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Home : Blog : December 2012

Content Marketing: The Pot-of-Gold at the End of all that Pain

December 17, 2012

The Pain in Content Marketing

Content Marketing is a generic term used to refer to marketing activities that involve the creation and sharing of content targeting a well-defined market, towards the purposes of creating visibility for a brand, generating interest in the brand, closing sales for the brand, and engaging customers and consumers of the brand. The objectives behind the activities are to build brand loyalty and brand goodwill.

Content marketing has always been deployed by brand owners and marketers, but the term has gained greater salience and marketing buzz of late thanks to the centrality of content in online brand marketing programmes. If, in the old days, content marketing restricted itself to custom magazines/newsletters, marketing collateral, events and roadshows, and direct mailers; in the online universe, it takes the forms of digital marketing collateral, e-newsletters and emailers, blogs, websites and microsites, social media brand pages and the associated content, apps and games (mobile and social media), podcasts/webcasts/webinars, and online video channels.

The greater salience of content marketing, these days, is not on account of the forms, but on account of the increasing volume of content creation and the high frequency of content sharing, online, and on account of the availability of a new generation of media types, online, that can be used to create the content. The more the content, the more novel the content, the more the distribution of content: the more the visibility of the brand and, hopefully, interest in the brand.

The pains in content marketing are primarily on account of:
  • The immense difficulty, no doubt made easier by spending more money, in constantly creating content that delivers a memorable experience to consumers. Breakthrough content requires either new ideas or novel conceptualisations (of old ideas) or fresh packaging (of old or new ideas) or all three. Be that as it may, even then content curators are not assured of the memorability of the content:
    • Is the tone right: is it patronising? Does the content interest viewers, whilst not forgetting to pitch the brand?
    • Does the content establish an emotional connection with the brand? Does it set brand expectations too high or just right?
  • The cost of distributing content, once it is created, is not trivial, and many organisations forget to factor in this cost; ending up in a situation where breakthrough content is insufficiently promoted and posted.
  • The lack of clarity regarding the type of content that interests consumers and the efficacy of such content in engendering awareness:
    • The top activities of consumers on the Internet are posting pictures, listening to music, watching videos, and playing games. So, does all content need to comply to one or more of these categories?
    • User-generated videos outscored professionally produced videos 3 out of 4 times, in a new ad effectiveness study (comScore and EXPO)
    • According to a study by Napkin Labs, a Facebook app developer, on an average, only 6% of fans engage with a brand's Facebook Page via likes, comments, shares, etc.; with the average engagement being the equivalent of less than one like over the course of the eight weeks the study was conducted. It is quite posible that most, if not all, of these fans are anyway customers of the brands concerned.

The Pot of Gold

Is all this pain worth the reward? Let's take a look at a study by digital marketing agency, Visibility IQ, in the UK, into the online viewing habits of web users: the most prominent finding being that 78% of UK adults use the internet to watch a video every week. Furthermore, 96% of users cited purchase consideration as their primary motive for watching these videos, with 57% going on to purchase an item after seeing it in an online video. Finally, over half of those watching brand-related content will share it with friends. SMI

The facts of the matter are that in order to be visible and in order to be talked about on the Internet, a content marketing strategy is a must-have: the only debate is about the contours of such a strategy. A multi-layered approach that iterates a process of define-determine-refine, as outlined below, would be a systematic way to go about framing a content marketing strategy:
  • Layer 1: Define Online Behaviour of Target Market
    Given that the target market is known, and having confirmed that the representation of this target market online is not insignificant, the next step for a brand owner is to identify the online behaviour of the target market: social media platform and activity preferences, other online platform and activity preferences, geographic/demographic/psychographic profiles, etc. This information may either be pulled from secondary sources or through a primary online research activity or analysing the data generated by visitors to company-curated sites using web analytics tools.
  • Layer 2: Define and Execute a Broad Range of Online Marketing Activities
    Since the brand owner is going to define a strategy from scratch, it is best if as broad a range of online marketing activities, as possible within the execution bandwidth constraints of the brand owner, are planned. The purpose is to showcase different content forms through the activities. Ideally, the execution timeline of any activity should not go beyond a quarter, allowing the brand owner to execute and collect metrics on each activity by the end of two quarters.
  • Layer 3: Carry out A/B Testing of Content and of Look & Feel
    Wherever possible, A/B Testing should be carried out on the content, in order to fine-tune content tone, content intent, and look & feel. A/B Testing will only be possible on brand sites and with respect to brand owner initiated activities, and that too only on content in activities that are not technically-intensive; but non-rigourous multi-variate testing can be carried out on content on social media platforms to get a feel for user preferences.
  • Layer 4: Analyse the Data and Determine Efficacy and Preferences
    The data collected at Layers 2 and 3 should be analysed to determine the efficacy of and the finetuned preferences within each content marketing form. Based on the analysis, the fittest, as decided by a pre-defined score, content marketing forms and content presentation preferences are retained.
  • Layer 5: Refine and Reiterate
    The brand owner now adds a new set of online marketing activities, showcasing further new forms of content marketing or using the more effective content marketing forms as determined in Layer 4, and repeats layers 2, 3, & 4.
Content marketing at the best of times is time-consuming and resource-intensive, and in the online universe these difficulties are further exacerbated by the uncertainity regarding the appropriateness and efficacy of different forms of content, and by the frequency with which new content needs to be created and posted. The process just outlined will go some way towards easing the job of content marketing, for brand owners and marketers.
Tags: Content Marketing, A/B Testing, Cross-channel
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