The Content Marketing Quandary

There has been a lot written about content marketing over the past few years and something tells me it isn't going away anytime soon based on the sheer number of articles that cross my news feeds seemingly every hour of the day.

In 2013 the last year I could find stats businesses spent more than $118 billion on content marketing according to eMarketer alone. With more than 85 percent adoption among B2B marketers, content marketing is certainly becoming more widely accepted among businesses across industries and verticals. However, according to Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute only 35 percent of B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy in place, while 14 percent have no strategy in place at all. This doesn't surprise me one bit as over the past several years that I've been involved on both sides of the demand gen/content marketing equation as both a consultant and customer most organizations treat content as a necessary evil at a very tactical level. They know to feed the marketing automation beast they need to create content and most know it needs to be aligned with where their prospect is in the buying process but strategy is never used in the same sentence. Why?...because content in many organizations from my experience for the most part is treated at the tactical campaign level and as such it’s invariably not scalable and truth be told is difficult at best to produce. Just think of the amount of work it takes to publish a good quality ebook, video or email nurture campaign. I get chills just writing about it! What the answer? Thought you would never ask.

When I hear treating content strategically what that means to me is going back to my grad school days and reminds me for the evening news show we produced we had a very structured process and systematic approach we used to produce the show. Without such a process it would have been ciaos and most likely no show would have aired each evening. We had footage we shot weeks or months in advance and when needed would pull for the show. We treated the news show like a product getting produced on an assembly line using a mix of live and canned footage for what we needed but the key was we had thought about (part of our strategy) and pre-produced what we needed in advance. This same approach can be used in today’s modern marketing content strategy development. Start thinking about how you and your organization can start treating your content needs by first thinking about it as a content manufacturing process. Think about all the pieces that go into creating and producing good quality content. Like with any process it starts with a framework. Think about creating your framework from a content supply chain perspective. If you don’t know where to start I would be happy to recommend resources that can help you get started.

Lastly, let me know your thoughts, stories and challenges when it comes to content marketing. Love to hear from you!

Thanks!

Bryan