It seems like every day, hundreds of how-to posts are published telling you how to publish interesting and entertaining branded content. However, in the end it comes down to how much you love your work, doesn’t it?
About six months ago I met with a friend in France who crafts guitars and mannequins for martial arts. He wanted to get my advice on a „strategy“ which would be different than just distributing flyers and pasting posters all over the place to get attention from people who might be interested in what he does.
Of course I went 2.0 and gave him a little speech on Content Marketing and the power behind Social Media. As I explained it to him, he thought of John Neeman Tools, a small crew of craftsmen from Latvia. He instantly knew what I wanted to say with „outstanding content“ because this crew has had huge success in 2013 with the content they put out there.
When craftsmen do Content Marketing – John Neeman Tools
John Neeman Tools is a small company founded by craftsmen from Lattvia. They produce very high quality, handmade tools like axes, knives and strongbows. They invest a lot of time and work in the production process. You can truly see how much love and passion is put into each and everyone of their products.
Last year, Neeman Tools published a video showing how they produce their tools. The first part – which shows the axe making process (below) – has been viewed over 200 thousand times by now. In total, the trilogy „The birth of a Tool“ got over 2 million views on Youtube and Vimeo!
I contacted the guys from Neeman Tools and and asked Jacob some questions.
Before founding Neeman Tools, he made his living making movies and editing pictures and knew he wanted to use this know-how with Neeman Tools as well. He told me:
Describing that we were hand crafting tools simply would not tell a complete enough story. I wanted to show the world what we were doing. Only through the working hands of the craftsmen could we show exactly the level of work we were doing. The movies are made by myself with the help of my brother. They are the key how people finds us.
Marketers would say: he wanted to use branded content and storytelling to attract a niche audience. But I love the fact that he doesn’t use the buzzwords we marketers come accross every day. He’s basically saying that Content Marketing worked for him… in his own words.
Actually we have not invested any pennie in our marketing – I have made the movies with the Camera and equipment that I had by myself.The only marketing strategy was to make the documentary movies and show the craftsmanship as forever living art form disipte the HI-Tech age we are living in.
And they succeeded with their tremendous Content. 18.000 Facebook Fans and they same amount of subscribers to their channel speak for themselves! To have a look at their pictures, you can checkt out their Flickr Account, it’s worth having a look at!
What can we learn from Neeman Tools?
What I particularly love about this case of successful „content marketing“ (I put it into brackets because they had no idea they were doing content marketing) is that the idea of producing content was born from their passion for their work. It wasn’t a necessity and it wasn’t a well established strategy some expert advised them to adopt. Just love for what they do. I’m not saying that a strategy is worthless. What I want to say is: Passion is the most important ingredient for content marketing success! Not budget…
Let me conclude this article with another quote from Jacob which says it all:
I think people enjoy our movies not only for the glimpse into our crafting process but because they are entertaining as well. Enthusiasts for these tools, or the trades they are using in crave more media about their passions. In some way, we are providing that for them.
