Social, Local and Content Marketing...in Song

Little Howard, Hymn to Telford

One of the themes that emerged from the recent Social Media Week London was the importance of content as a marketing tool. Whether it's being used to drive traffic, sell stuff, engage users, building brand equity the brand's hopeful quest to create a meme is a challenge for plenty of marketers.

A campaign doesn't have to be pretty to work. Throw in a little social, make it local and you have a winning formula, surely? Maybe this is the carefully planned strategy behind the marketing for comedian Howard Read's latest tour or he's a prodigious songwriter with a penchant for small town Britain.

For each town Howard and his cartoon side-kick, Little Howard, visit, they're creating a song, complete with local facts, history and irritatingly good ear-worms, "I'm a fool for Poole". Songs include: Hymn to Telford, The Daft Half of Bath, All Will Be Revealed in Sheffield and Song for Poole.

A little context to add relevancy and we have content marketing best practice from a cartoon character, as Little Howard says on his blog,

First on our tour was Telford! There isn’t a SINGLE song about that?! Why on earth not?! It’s got a MASSIVE Halfords!

So far there's four songs with a promise of one for each town on the tour. Frankly, if this works for Little Howard's Tour, the career trajectory that's already included CBBC and the Royal Variety Show surely has only one pinnacle: Eurovision.

You know it makes sense!