Kevin Lee: “Show me the content marketing ROI!”

Didit Editorial

10 years ago

January 30, 2015: Content marketing is a huge business today — all told, the group of activities grouped under the rubric of content marketing (which include social, SEO, copyrighting, analytics, and many related tasks) constitute a $44 billion business. Those firms that have invested in content marketing are doing well today because consumers perform more of their pre-purchase due diligence using search engines, blogs, and social media, have a strong aversion to “push-style” messaging from brands, and reward companies that create helpful, engaging editorial to meet their informational needs.

At the same time, however, advocates of content marketing and/or inbound marketing have faced an uphill battle in the C-suite. Expectations are poorly set, While most agree that content marketing is a worthy activity that can produce brand lift, increased lead flow, and other positive, measurable behavior, expectations can be poorly set, resulting in too few resources being assigned to content marketing teams.

In this week’s ClickZ.com, Didit’s Kevin Lee provides a spirited defense of content marketing that asks those in the C-suite to more intelligently appraise the potential — as well of the risk — of fielding content marketing efforts. He notes that “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” that content marketing’s positive effects extend to traditional activities such as PR and storytelling, and that content marketing projects can yield powerful — and very valuable insights by surfacing audience intelligence insights that can be plowed back into product development.

As Kevin notes, content marketing also contributes to a “long-tail presence” that can be very helpful in terms of extending an organization’s influence among searchers deep in due-diligence, pre-purchase research. “Most content you produce won’t “go viral,” he writes, “but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t serve an important purpose: driving traffic, over time, from searchers searching not on page one of Google, but on page three or five. Such traffic is low-volume, but can be very high-quality (after all, these people wouldn’t be on page three if they weren’t passionately interested in a topic (or perhaps being paid to research one). My team regularly sees qualified leads drop in from articles that we had thought had “dropped off the radar screen” (or at least the primary Google SERPs) long ago. Such “long tail” traffic is low in volume, but sometimes very high in quality.”

Read complete article at ClickZ.com:
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2392763/-show-me-the-content-marketing-roi