Content marketing has increased in popularity over the past year, with 88 percent of business-to-business (B2B) companies engaging in this marketing strategy and 90 percent of consumers indicating that custom content is useful.
Even if you do not work in the marketing industry directly, the ability to create quality content can be an indispensable skill in all jobs. Businesses across industries require employees to send email newsletters, publish white papers, draft advertisements, write grant proposals and pen blog posts.
However, creating and marketing content is time-intensive. What technologies can help facilitate this process?
The Cloud presents a unique opportunity for businesses that create, distribute and market content. It improves the efficiency of the process, which in turn leads to the production of higher quality content, in a more consistent, collaborative and cost-effective way. In fact, nearly half, 47 percent, of medium and large businesses identified improved business efficiency as the main benefit of the Cloud.
Overall, using the Cloud can help you produce better content in three ways:
- Reduce the Cost of IT Services and Equipment
First, with the Cloud, IT professionals who work remotely provide technical support to businesses. This remote support system removes the burden of managing and paying a large in-house IT team.
For a lot of businesses, the greatest expense is employee wages and in-house IT staff is especially expensive, with the average IT worker making $50,000 per year and the average Chief Technology Officer making over three times that salary at $166,000 per year.
Second, businesses that use cloud storage services, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Apple iCloud or Microsoft OneDrive, benefit from access to scalable data plans and around-the-clock data monitoring from cloud service providers (CSP). Transitioning from on-site servers to cloud storage means eliminating the cost of powering, maintaining and updating these legacy systems in exchange for a monthly data access fee.
Not having to manage a large, in-house IT team or expensive equipment leaves more resources to fuel content creation, distribution and marketing. For example, a business could dedicate a larger portion of their budget to conducting surveys and interviews to strengthen their content projects or to hiring a marketing agency to assist in distributing content.
- Improve Backup and Recovery to Protect Work
Quality content creation demands a lot of time, energy and passion. After spending months planning and drafting a project, you do not want to lose your work. However, a business that relies on on-site servers risks losing data and files if the servers are damaged from a natural disaster, physical accident or malware infection.
Backing up files on the cloud protects a business from situations that may result in data loss. In fact, backing up files is the primary task small and medium businesses use the Cloud to accomplish. If faced with a problem, the business can recover its data and files from the remotely located CSP’s data center. The ease with which businesses can backup and recover data can avert costly delays in the content production and distribution cycle.
- Increase Accessibility and Promote Collaboration
The Cloud also can make data and files more accessible to employees and facilitates collaboration.
For example, if inclement weather forces employees to stay home, they still can access their work from a personal laptop or mobile device with Internet connection. The inability to get to the office no longer stalls important projects.
File sharing is another feature of the Cloud’s accessibility. Employees easily can collaborate by editing updating and commenting on documents and files, even when they are not in the same location.
Closing Reflections
As new technologies arise and existing ones improve over time, new opportunities for better content marketing emerge. For example, with the introduction of wearable technology, content marketers now have another option for distributing content widely.
Similarly, the Cloud offers numerous benefits to businesses across industries. Specifically for marketing, cloud computing can make the content creation process more efficient by cutting costs, protecting work and making projects more accessible and open to collaboration.
