Inbound Marketing Age

Content marketing has risen to prominence amongst both B2C and B2B marketers, driven in part by the significant influence of search engines on today’s shoppers and buyers and the diminishing power of conventional advertising.

Compared to traditional marketing programs, content marketing costs 62% less and generates approximately three times the volume of leads.

Countless numbers of companies have embraced it and placed it at the core of their marketing strategies, but what is the case for it? Is it a no-brainer, or are their downsides too?

To help you consider it, plan for it or even review your ongoing strategy, here are ten pros and cons of Content Marketing.

As a creator of online content, it’s important to have a keen awareness of your audience. Not surprisingly, this includes people from all backgrounds. The internet is for everybody - and businesses have a social responsibility to strive for more inclusive design.

People tune in for more than pure sound or image. Videos carry a message, and viewers with hearing or vision loss shouldn’t be made to feel excluded from global communications. Screen readers are making it easier for people with poor vision or hearing to browse the web, and content makers need to step up to the mark. 

I’m one of these strange people that actually enjoy hearing about the latest marketing theories, reading up on best practice, researching the most recent thoughts on marketing strategy and tactics and all those articles on how to maximise your results. It’s great to know about the theory and hear what the greatest marketing gurus in the land think you should be doing.

But as a consultant, too often I see businesses attempting the most advanced marketing techniques, trying out the sexy, cutting edge ideas, refining some small area of their marketing plan to the nth degree,

Social media has solidified its reputation as a viable B2B marketing tool.

Rather than the fun, leisurely pastime it once was, it is now prolific in the digital marketing space and has been adopted by major business brands looking to take full advantage of the opportunities it offers.

I can’t stand reading my old blogs.

I'd go around the houses about five times before saying anything concrete. I used vocabulary I wasn’t totally comfortable with. And I always seemed to think more was ...more. More words, more examples, more regurgitations of the same ideas.

Of course, that’s reflected in the stats.

Even if traffic was high, nobody was hanging around long enough to extract any value from my posts.

Professional services firms using a content marketing strategy will traditionally have written blog posts to rank for specific, individual keywords that relate to their business.

But with people now searching using longer, more complex terms, search engines now favour topic-based content. And this means that professional services firms need to take a smarter approach to their content marketing strategy.

The solution?

Pillar pages.

Marketers strive for healthy organic reach. And when it comes to video marketing campaigns, this is heavily effected by engagement rates.

On social media platforms, like Facebook for example, news feeds are designed to favour content from people or brands that users have previously engaged with.

So, I am making my New Year resolutions again, and one that I keep adding in is to blog smarter – blog better. It’s a great goal I’m sure you’ll agree, but where do we start?

What is the best practice? What works and what doesn’t work? If only someone published some useful stats that we could use? Oh, hang on…

 Well, wouldn’t you know it, Orbit Media Studios have published their 2018 survey of blogging statistics and trends – how helpful is that? (Check out the link for the full research).

As a B2B marketer, you already have a strategy in place when it comes to social media - you may even have established a social media policy for your workplace. But the goalposts are always changing.

So what challenges will 2019 bring?

New opportunities

Last year there were several announcements that promised to affect social media marketing in 2019, for example:

• LinkedIn Dynamic Ads will enable you to personalise the content in paid ads and automate individualised campaigns at scale. 66% of B2B marketers used paid methods to distribute content in 2018, so this development is sure to make waves.
• Snapchat announced a partnership with Amazon to offer a "visual search" shopping experience directly from the Snapchat app. There are likely to be improvements in image recognition technologies that will open up the potential for multimedia search. This will shake up SEO tactics.
• Twitter brought back the chronological News Feed format.
• Pantone revealed the colour of the year: Living Coral. Visual media trends continue to favour the bright, cheerful, pale and pure.

And that's not all.

Whether you have an inbound strategy or not, I think it's fair to assume that  staying competitive, profitable and on top of search engine results pages (SERPs) is a priority for most businesses.

But that requires you to constantly have your finger on the pulse - algorithm updates, ranking factors and changes in your readers’ behaviour will all influence not just a content marketing strategy, but a marketing strategy full stop.

You’ve spent hours producing content, publishing it and promoting it and now you have to measure its impact and prove Return On Investment (ROI) to the board as well? Isn’t just publishing it enough?

In a word, no.

If you can’t prove your marketing is working, then you are putting effort in for nothing.

• How do you know it is useful?
• How do you know it is the best you can do?
• How do you know your efforts are not making things worse even?

So measuring is essential.