Content marketing decisions for customers’ desired value in the tourism sector

Abstract

In a landscape of increasing customer/firm interactions in digital space, content marketing, which aims to generate prospects and sales to foster customers' brand engagement, brand awareness and trust, is on the rise. Notwithstanding, despite significant marketing specialist interest, scientific content marketing research is not widely developed. Therefore, it encourages the need for new studies in the content marketing field. This paper introduces theoretical and practical aspects of content marketing decisions for the creation of desired customer value in the tourism sector. The aim of the presented research is to determine which combinations of content marketing decisions could create the desired value for the customer in the tourism sector. Understanding the content marketing decisions that create the desired value for customers could lead to a proper implementation of content marketing in the tourism sector. The presented results of q-sort study indicate twelve different combinations of content marketing decisions which could be used by tourism organizations in order to create desired value for their customer. Thus, it means that increasement of desired customer value can be made in the light of content marketing usage. The paper ends with insights, conclusions, limitations and future research possibilities.

Analysis of the concept of content marketing

“…Regarding the approach/area of content marketing specifically, the study of the publications revealed different approaches. Most authors perceive content marketing as a marketing strategy (Radenković-Šošić, 2013;Rastokaitė, 2016;Repovienė, 2017;Repovienė and Pažėraitė, 2019;Salminen et al, 2019;Wilcock, 2018;Wagner and Boatright, 2019). Other authors perceive content marketing as a marketing method (Wall and Spinuzzi, 2018), the art of communication (Poradova, 2020), or a marketing technique (Halevi and O'Hanlon, 2016).…”

“…The findings suggest that content marketing is essential, and the most important are (co)creation and distribution of information. Finally, the study of the aims of content marketing revealed that it is vital to make a decision (Järvinen and Taiminen, 2016;Tsiakali, 2018;Mansour and Barandas, 2017), retain customers (Radenković-Šošić, 2013), build loyalty (Radenković-Šošić, 2013;Du Plessis, 2017c), provide benefits (Repovienė and Pažėraitė, 2017;Turon and Juzek, 2015;Repovienė and Pažėraitė, 2019), and build credibility (Wagner and Boatright, 2019). It can be stated that the results (outcomes) of content marketing are essential, and it is most important to provide benefits and decision making.…”

“…Content marketing is a form of interactive marketing that does not have an unambiguous, uniform definition (Du Plessis, 2017a;Repovienė and Pažėraitė, 2019;Poradova, 2020). For instance, content marketing is defined as a marketing strategy characterized by creating and disseminating the content that is valuable, consistent, and appropriate to achieve the desired goals (Baltes, 2015) or a marketing technique described by developing and disseminating an informative, entertaining, free of charge content (Wall and Spinuzzi, 2018).…”

Online Tourist Behavior of the Net Generation: An Empirical Analysis in Taiwan Based on the AISAS Model

“…While traditional marketing and advertising is still present, digital marketing and advertising is growing much more rapidly. In the digital marketing sphere, content marketing is a way for customers to take the initiative in looking for product information and also represents an opportunity for hospitality and travel marketers to curate meaningful materials for them [42,43]. The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) (2014) defined content marketing to be "a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience-and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action".…”

O marketing de conteúdo em plataforma digital: análises bibliométrica e textual

“…Contudo, Gundlach (2007) O conceito de marketing de conteúdo visa atrair e reter os clientes por intermédio de produções e distribuições de conteúdos exclusivos, relevantes, valiosos, bem produzidos e divertidos. Por outro lado, destaca-se que as empresas devem se atentar a confiabilidade dos seus itens publicados (Repovienė & Pažėraitė, 2019).…”