Most content marketing research suggests that the adoption rate among marketers – both B2B and B2C – is around 90% or above. Pretty much, everyone in marketing is doing content these days… or are they? Aberdeen’s content marketing research, for example, does confirm that 92% of marketers report that creating high-quality content is either valuable or very valuable to their organizations, but only 52% of those marketers rate their execution as “effective” or “very effective.” This, of course, begs the question, if a large percentage of marketers aren’t actually effective at content marketing, can we really call what they’re doing “content marketing?”
This is an important distinction because if these marketers aren’t actually doing content marketing, but simply executing on a misinformed imitation, they’ll never be able to effectively achieve their desired results. Take how humans achieved flight, for example. We didn’t accept that people who jumped in the air and flapped their arms like wings were, in fact, flying, but just really ineffective at it – that would be bird imitation, not true aviation. Similarly, in content marketing, simply producing a mass of marketing materials or other basic “stuff” can’t really be dismissed as ineffective content marketing because it’s not content marketing at all.
Substance: The Difference between Content Marketing & Stuff Marketing
Content marketing research shows that marketers who align their content to the specific buying stages of their prospects achieve 73% higher conversion rates, on average, than their peers who don’t use this tactic. For general context, that’s about the difference in speed between an elite professional runner who can clock a 4 minute mile (15 mph), and an average athlete who runs a 7 minute mile (8.7 mph). In both instances, though, the two parties are seemingly worlds apart. In content marketing, that’s because aligning content to buyer criteria hinges on the primary thing that separates content marketing from stuff marketing: substance.
For buyers, true content has substance. It matters. It carries weight. It may even have some utility. In the content marketing vocabulary, “content” is synonymous with “asset” – in that it is an object with distinct value. In stuff marketing, though, content is just another word for an object – something that’s been produced for the sake of production. When content marketers align their marketing materials to address the needs and interests of their buyers, they’re working to produce substantial assets – content with content, so to speak –for their audience. Naturally, that’s why we see such elevated conversion rates among these marketers; because their content is worth the conversions for their buyers.
Why Stuff Marketing Doesn’t Work:
Content marketing works. With website conversion rates nearly six times higher for content marketing practitioners vs. non-practitioners, and more than six times the annual growth in marketing’s contribution to revenue among leading content marketing organizations vs. their peers, you have only two of the countless business cases for why content marketing works. Stuff marketing, however, doesn’t work. In the simplest explanation, stuff marketing fails on the “if you build it, they will come” fallacy – that all you need to do is produce marketing materials, and prospects will find you and convert throughout your funnel. Stuff marketing, after all, is only about producing stuff, while content marketing has a bit more content to it. Specifically, what makes content marketing an effective marketing strategy, and stuff marketing… well, not so much, includes:
- An Institution for Distribution: Content marketing requires an active two-way communication network, not only for pushing out content, but for pulling in audience insights. Marketers who listen to their customers through engagement analytics , for example, average a 14.6% annual increase in positive social media mentions, which can help to further distribute their organization’s content. Stuff marketing, however, operates on one-to-many, one-way communications. Stuff marketing ignores the conversational and educational opportunities in engaging communities, and just aims to pump out brand messaging and push products. At best, it’s unsophisticated and haphazard, and at worst, it’s a means to alienate or offend prospects.
- Avenues for External Validation: Content marketing isn’t only about creating assets; it also entails collecting, curating, and collaborating with other sources of value for buyers. Whether it’s establishing trust by incorporating third party research, highlighting savvy customers through their own success stories, or welcoming contributed content from industry peers, content marketing builds trust among buyers by creating avenues for validation. Stuff marketing, using marketing materials only created in-house and focusing only on the brand, or its products or services, has no external avenues for validation, and is rarely trusted by buyers.
- Opportunities to Repurpose and Recycle: As content marketing is about producing quality assets, not just high quantities of materials, it affords marketers the luxury of being able to reuse, repurpose, or refresh effective content to meet any increased demands. Just like reruns of great TV shows, good content continues to inform, engage or entertain target audiences, even when it’s not hot off the presses, so it offers a relatively stable supply. Stuff marketing doesn’t have quality as a hedge, however, so it requires marketers to continually produce more and more marketing materials that often become obsolete soon after their release.
By now, I hope it doesn’t seem like pulling hairs in drawing this distinction between content marketing and stuff marketing. In fact, I hope you have your own insights to add on what is and isn’t content marketing. Even if you completely disagree with the value of this distinction, though, please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below…