Content Marketing in the Corner Office
Content marketing has been a hot topic in marketing for several years. Articles in Forbes, Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review and other mainstream business information outlets have educated businesses owners and non-marketing leaders about the benefits of content marketing. Many of these people are on-board, and we, as marketers, have their attention.
Justifying and Tracking Content Marketing Investments
Over the past few years, marketing and sales departments invested more heavily in automation and tracking applications to quantify the value of marketing campaigns.
John Koetsier is a contributor to VentureBeat, a leading source for news and perspective on technology innovation. His recent article titled, “Marketing Technology Innovation Exploding: 1,876 Companies in 43 Categories,” digs into the area of marketing technology investments.
The overall number of these companies doubled year-over-year. In other words, there are 929 new marketing tech firms that were not on planet Earth a year ago.
Let me give you one guess which marketing category represents the biggest area of growth. If you guessed, “content marketing,” you get a gold star. The intense focus on the subject naturally leads to more research to understand the phenomenon and its implications.
What Do Marketers Say About Content Marketing?
IDG Enterprise, in partnership with LinkedIn Technology Marketing group, is one of many companies that has ventured into content marketing research with its recently published B2B Content Marketing Spotlight Report. What are the top three reasons B2B marketers give for their investments in content marketing?
- Lead Generation: Help prospective buyers find you through search, social and other marketing channels and nurture prospective customers through email marketing.
- Thought Leadership: Market Education: Demonstrate domain authority to Google, Bing, etc with original content, build credibility with new and returning site visitors directly or through credible third-parties (press, bloggers, analysts, influencers, etc).
- Brand Awareness: There’s still value in brand-building campaigns (advertising in relevant online trade journals, industry newsletters, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc).
The people surveyed gave answers off the top of their heads that sound pretty strategic and reasonable. Yes, you can track lead generation results, but let’s get real. Given the skyrocketing tech investments around content marketing, “Thought Leadership” and “Brand Awareness” sound pretty “squishy.”
Where’s the Content Strategy?
65 Percent of Marketers Talk a Good Game
The C-suite knows about content marketing, and marketing folks are trying to measure their effectiveness. But is there a target they are trying to hit? Do they have a roadmap, or are they simply creating content for the sake of creating more content?
According to the Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) 2015 B2B Content Marketing Study, only 35 percent of B2B companies have a documented content marketing strategy in place. A lot of marketers can tell you why they want to “do content marketing.” CMI reports “60 percent of those who have a documented strategy rate themselves highly in terms of content marketing effectiveness, compared with 32 percent of those who have a verbal strategy.”
While it’s great to be able to talk about strategy, “talk is cheap” as the saying goes. It should go without saying that companies without a documented content marketing strategy are less effective than those counterparts (and competitors) who have put these thoughts down on paper or another more suitable, digital format.
Without a documented strategy, how are these marketers socializing (selling) and measuring (selling) the objectives, goals, strategies, programs and tactics within their companies? How are they justifying their budgets, departments and jobs?
Build Strategy on Insights and Analytics
As part of its SEO and Organic Search Services, Blueprint helps companies build and document search and content strategies focused on performance-based metrics.
Each strategy and roadmap is crafted with insights gained from data analytics and best practices. Performance is tracked, reported and adjusted monthly based on real-world data.
Deliver Intelligent Content Focused on Results – Not Just More Content
There’s no shortage of content being published on the Web today. There’s more noise than ever before, but there are still tremendous opportunities to break through the content clutter and convert prospects into buyers.
Before you stampede into content marketing, it would be wise to have a strategy that encompasses more than high-level buzzwords and gobbledygook.
Build and document your strategy with measurable goals (rankings, qualified leads, conversions, etc) and a content marketing roadmap focused your audience (personas) and keywords (including long-tail phrases).
If you are not building, executing and tracking digital marketing strategies tied to revenue goals, you may have to answer to the C-Suite and your marketing tech investments – sooner than later.