Content is one of the best performing marketing tools in today’s marketing armoury, meaning the industry is achieving double digit growth, when others are struggling to maintain share of the media wallet. From Barclays to Boden companies of all flavours are investing in ways to engage, inform and entertain their customers. The reason, quite simply, is that it works.
From its heritage in customer publishing, content has evolved and is now the quintessential media neutral discipline. Consumers are able to interact with their favourite brands across every conceivable touch point including TV, apps, online games, email newsletters, Ecommerce, magazines and ezines and are responding to it in their droves. A quarter of all content consumed is now produced by organisations as a way to add value to their relationship with their customers.
However, the discipline’s greatest strength also has the potential of becoming its greatest enemy. With the amount of choice affording marketers both across the different channels available to them and the content of the content itself the messages run the risk of becoming fragmented and disjointed. The strategy that ties it all together is now the biggest concern for organisations that are planning to engage with their customers over the long term, without it content has the habit of developing a life of its own and becoming uncontrollable.
Strategy is probably the most misused term in today’s business vernacular. What is one person’s strategy is another’s objectives, yet another’s aims or someone else’s tactics. In content marketing however, the strategy is simply the storyline, the underlying plot. Without a story content has no context and can be meaningless. The uninitiated might be lulled into a false sense of security, mistakenly believing the art of storytelling is child’s play, but in reality often the simplest sounding tasks are the trickiest. Weaving together a content strategy that not only works across all channels but also ties into other marketing activities that can run for a year or longer is a daunting challenge. Research by the CMA reveals that consumers are increasingly looking to their favourite brands to provide them with fresh content, for example they want content driven websites to be updated at least once a day and social media platforms such as banded ace book pages more frequently. This could add up to literally thousands of column inches every month, not to mention the supplementary video content or games and web chat. The International Content Marketing Summit on 28th November devotes an entire morning session to understanding content planning in order to get the right message to the right audience at the right time – all whilst keeping that person engaged so that they choose to interact time, after time, after time.
