As a marketing professional, I try to keep an eye on new developments in my industry and the field of marketing. Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of discussions about content marketing, why it’s important, how to measure it and what to do, etc. In fact, the Content Marketing Institute shows that content marketing is so popular that 91 percent of B2B marketers and 86 percent of B2C marketershave content marketing initiatives this year alone. Marketing Profs studied marketers in North America and noted that 54% of B2B marketers say that they will increase their content marketing spending.
So why are so many marketers focusing on content marketing? Have you noticed that many of us are guilty of watching TV shows on demand or online so we can either skip commercials or see a small subset of the commercials shown on TV? What about online banner ads and ads in our personal email inboxes? How often do people read them let alone respond to them? Most people, like me, have become skilled at reading the relevant content and skipping these ads all together.
If you’ve ignored ads or think your customers might be skipping your cleverly worded and attractive display ad or email campaign, you now know that traditional marketing is no longer effective, and you need to improve your content marketing efforts. Quickly.
What is Content Marketing?
There are many descriptions of content marketing but to me it means creating and sharing content that’s relevant and valuable to our target buyers that can potentially cause them to seriously consider our company’s products and services which is a customer insights driven integrated marketing platform just for retail marketers if you use my company as an example.
Where Does Content Matter?
Great content exists in many places throughout the marketing function and can be effective if you match the content to the right channels at the right time to the appropriate audience. Here are a few areas that that have worked for me:
- SEO – Optimizing your site so visitors and prospects can easily find you through a search engine means that you must create and curate high-quality content on a consistent basis. It is not enough to have a few great pieces of content such as a white paper, an infographic or webinar. You have to be consistent so put together a content calendar and publish great content on a regular basis.
- Social Media – If you’ve done your job and have a great content calendar, sharing that content through social media means that you have something valuable and relevant to engage your users instead of simply using it as an extension of your PR strategy for only outbound efforts. Of course, you have to adapt the content into bite-sized chunks to make it easy to digest and to regularly engage your audience. This rule applies not just to social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter but also your blog.
- Public Relations – Gone are the days when putting out a press release was enough. Today, your content marketing efforts must include thought leadership stories which means writing insightful stories that are unique, entertaining and contain useful information that’s relevant for the readers.
- Sales Enablement – Content marketing isn’t just for your external audience but for use inside your company. Your field sales, sales development reps and account managers all need content to help them better understand what’s unique about the products and services your company provides. They need to be educated on the features and functionality of your products, how they rate against competitors and what’s new. The PowerPoint sales decks are also part of your content strategy.
- PPC – If your company is going to pay to bring leads to your site, relevant and valuable content becomes even more important, so you need to understand your target buyer, their pain points, where they go to look for information and how they buy, so you don’t waste company resources.
- Inbound Marketing – one of the primary goals every Marketer has is to generate demand for their company so the importance of great content at the beginning, middle and end of the funnel cannot be overstated. Without insightful and pertinent content, you will never generate good leads or keep your customers engaged over a period of time. The content created for inbound marketing is potentially endless and can include live presentations, podcasts, videos, e-books, webinars, newsletters, white papers, case studies, etc.
Content Marketing Resources
Hopefully by now, you’ve realized the importance of revisiting your content strategy. If you want to learn more from the experts, I’ve listed some resources I’ve found helpful when thinking through my company’s strategy.
- Marketing Land - A wonderful curation of blogs, white papers, training, infographic, videos, podcasts and events all dedicated to the art of content marketing. Bookmark this site.
- Content Marketing Institute – An association with how to guides and practical guides on all things content marketing. The entire site is well organized, so it’s easy to find what you need. You can even sign up to have ideas delivered to you by email or subscribe to their Chief Content Officer (CCO) magazine.
- Marketo – Marketo has consistently delivered great marketing resources in an informative and non-threatening manner. They make learning more about the world of marketing fun including marketing content.
- Marketing Profs - Although this site’s goal is to sell a subscription to their training and online resources, they have plenty of free articles and tips to help you be a more effective content marketer.
Content marketing is an ever evolving and ever changing discipline. There is no one tactic or strategy that works for everyone and at all times so if you are like me, you are always experimenting, measuring and fine-tuning your strategy. In a future post, I will share how I measure the effectiveness of our content marketing efforts and metrics that I track to understand if our strategy is working.
Where do you see content marketing going? Are you investing more, about the same or less in your content strategy? What have you learned that is useful to share?