Content marketing is not a new concept in the digital marketing world. It wears a crown and stands at the forefront of all digital marketing strategies. Customers care little about products and services, they care about themselves, their wants and their needs. Content marketing is about creating interesting information that customers are passionate about to make them pay attention and want to know more.

There is no question that content is a popular tool for marketers to drive customer engagement, generate leads and increase brand awareness however, this seems to be putting a lot of pressure on marketers to produce and manage content effectively for modern online users.

Earlier this year, The Economist Group revealed a survey exposing a hefty gap between what companies are producing and what their audiences are looking for. According to their findings, 75% of business executives turn to content as the most valuable source to find out views of their industry to be inspired by new business ideas. Yet, 93% of marketers connect their audience directly to a service or product.

This undermines B2B marketer’s chances of success as businesses are guided straight to services and products, which can come across like a sales pitch. Engaging content begins with the audience and their business challenges. Buyers want their questions answered as well as insightful content. Changing their content methods and listening to the audience by putting their needs first with valuable information would be the most effective way into gaining trust and credibility against other competitors.

Marketers recognise that content takes varied forms of news, research, reports and videos however, producing them is an entirely different matter. The need to produce coherent content in a timely manner is placing a huge burden on marketing departments.

A study carried out by Seismic and Gatepoint Research suggested that marketing executives define their content management strategy as average or below average. From 100 marketing executives, a distressing 56% say they struggle with updating collateral, 52% say people don’t use the content because they can’t find it and 38% say they don’t have the ability to tell whether the content is effective.

These findings clearly show that there are still huge challenges within content marketing as updating material can be extremely time consuming for marketers. A good content management system that integrates real time data and analytics allow marketers to produce relevant and targeted content based on customer insight in a more effective way.

With large companies comes complexities. Multiple customer touchpoints can create opportunities for inconsistent messaging that can potentially damage the reputation and credibility of a brand - especially if the content is out of date, irrelevant and inaccurate. A coherent strategy combined with robust technology is necessary to overcome the majority of these challenges. This will ensure that customers are steered towards engaging content in a more seamless process. The more chances of customer interactions you have, the more likely you are to improve the overall business goal. As content marketing specialist, Andrew Davis says, “Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.”

 

By Anjana Varsani, digital marketing assistant at Better than Paper

 

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