August 3, 2015: Content Marketing continues to boom. It’s already a $44 billion business, according to the Custom Content Council. And 69 percent of B2Companies — and 70 percent of B2Bs — are creating more content than they were a year ago, according to the Content Marketing Institute. At the same time, however, some experts have voiced concerns that “content fatigue” — plus a market imbalance between the amount of content available vs. the number of actual human beings willing to consume this content — may clip the wings of future growth.
I’m bullish on Content Marketing, because I’ve seen it deliver real results. Investing in owned media delivers material, long term benefits to the organization. At the same time, however, I’m concerned that the expectations for the set of practices we group under the rubric “Content Marketing” are often oversold by its advocates. In many cases such expectations have been set so high that disappointment is practically guaranteed in the corporate boardroom.
Setting realistic expectations for what content marketing can do for your firm is vital to keep your efforts on track. So if somebody is challenging you on the financial justifiability of content marketing ROI, please remind them of the following points:
Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day
Successful content empires aren’t usually built from articles that “went viral” by becoming trending topics. Such empires are accreted slowly, article by article, link, by link, over time. Experienced content marketers know that it can a long time – and a fair amount of money – to build a library of content that can function as a permanent – not temporary – traffic magnet. How much time? I’d give yourself at least a year to develop a critical mass of articles that can result in a self-sustaining flow of traffic. How much money? Well, this depends a lot on whether you can make use of in-house resources to leverage your libraries of pre-existing content, or whether you have to pay somebody on the outside (an agency or freelances) to generate it from scratch. The good news is that content curation can be a very cost-effective strategy for those for whom generating original content is cost-prohibitive.
Branding Matters
Publishing a regular flow of content with thought built into it shows the world that you’re a thinker. Such content gives you an opportunity to create an emotional — as well as intellectual — bond with your target audience. You can be as creative with the content you create as you’d care to be, using tools that are much-improved over those of just a few years back. Never before has there been such a range of choices to convey stories and ideas. Blog articles, SlideShare presentations, videos, podcast, e-books, infographics, and webinars represent the most popular forms, with apps and even games likely to emerge as credible content marketing media in the future. Furthermore, managing the production of content (which is typically a highly collaborative process) has been made much easier due to the advent of cloud-based editorial management tools.
The Long Tail Matters
Most content you produce won’t “go viral,” but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t serve an important purpose: driving traffic, over time, from the long-tail. Content you produce on the Web has an “afterlife” that begins after you hit the publish button. For example, about a year ago, my team produced a short article discussing Vine and Instagram. For reasons that even our SEO team hasn’t been able to re-engineer, this article continues to attract a small but steady supply of qualified traffic. One article alone, afloat in the “long tail,” won’t do you much good. But 50 or 100 of them will, over time, can drive a small but high-quality flow of qualified visitors.
Benefits Compound
The benefits of content marketing flow across social media in a powerful, synergistic way (after all, what would your social channels link to if you didn’t supply content to them?) The process of actively serving out good content strengthens your posture across all of your other media. Good content drives social activity generates buzz and followers, and produces signals that search engines process as a proxy for authority. It benefits each and every marketing effort undertaken by your firm, multiplying — not just adding to — the strength of each.
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