Content Unpacked: How To Influence Customers, Get Discovered And Rise Above The Noise
Content Marketing In Industry
More and more content gets created every day – and it’s getting harder to influence customers, get discovered and rise above the noise.
While content marketing was once something new, clever, and practiced only by the people that ‘got’ the internet, that time is now over.
Over the past 3 to 5 years, the take up of content marketing has been phenomenal. Simply looking at Google Trends, we can see that the current interest in content marketing is nearly 10 times higher than it was just 5 years ago.
Source: Google trends – https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=content%20marketing
The Content Marketing Institute’s 2016 B2C and B2B Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends reports found that 76% of B2C Businesses and 88% of B2B businesses employ content marketing.
Source: Content Marketing Institute, B2C Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends
Source: Content Marketing Institute, B2B Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends
Furthermore, B2C and B2B businesses are on average spending 32% and 28% respectively of their organisation’s total marketing budget on content marketing.
Moving forward, 50% of B2C and 51% of B2B businesses are planning on increasing the amount that they spend on content marketing.
Source: Content Marketing Institute, B2C Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends
Source: Content Marketing Institute, B2B Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends
Despite these figures, only 38% of B2C marketers and 30% of B2B marketers believe that their organisation’s use of content marketing is effective.
Source: Content Marketing Institute, B2C Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends
Source: Content Marketing Institute, B2B Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends
The Content Marketing Institute’s 2016 B2C and B2B Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report offers a number of possible reasons behind this.
First of all, only 43% of B2C marketers and 44% of B2B marketers say that their organisation clearly define content marketing success or effectiveness.
Source: Content Marketing Institute, B2C Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends
Source: Content Marketing Institute, B2B Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends
Secondly, only 37% of B2C marketers and 32% of B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy despite the studies showing that those with a documented strategy are more effective in nearly all areas of content.
Source: Content Marketing Institute, B2C Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends
Source: Content Marketing Institute, B2B Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends
Whilst content marketing is becoming increasingly competitive the effectiveness of this strategy is underwhelming. In order to be successful, there must be clear definitions of success and a structured and controlled process is required to achieve this success.
Given the uptake of content marketing and the increasing competiveness of this strategy, the idea of ‘build it and they will come” simply no longer holds true. You may have the best content in the world but if no one sees it then of what worth is it?
Content promotion doesn’t get talked about a whole lot. That’s because it involves a meaningful amount of rejection and failure, and it requires a different set of skills than content creation.
If you’re willing to go beyond the absolute minimum of throwing a piece of content up on branded social accounts and then waiting for the traffic to roll in, you can get results that others never experience.
In a future post we’ll look at the tricks and techniques to rise above the noise.