Credit: Content Marketing Institute
Content marketing is a hot topic these days. A recent survey by the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs found that 85% of businesses aim to enhance their lead generation through content marketing. Meanwhile, 84% stated that their goal is to boost sales. It’s clear that content marketing is important to many.
The concern comes in when these same people were asked about how clear their companies are on what content marketing “success” looks like. Only 44% felt that there is a clear understanding of what success looks like. Worse yet, only 30% feel that their company’s use of content marketing is “effective” or “very effective”.
Why The Disconnect?
If companies have high goals for content marketing. And those goals impact major areas of any company such as lead generation and sales, why is there such a gap between what has been identified as important and the ability to clearly see what a successful content marketing looks like.
Inundation
Walk into any marketing department in any city and you will find people completely inundated with to-do lists that are spilling over. Digital marketing is a wonderful tool, but it has not made the life of a marketer easier. There are more marketing channels that require attention and that attention has to be paid at a higher frequently than ever before.
Couple all of that with the simple fact that creating content is tough, time-consuming work and you can see where this disconnect starts. Sure, it’s important. It absolutely has to be done. But, who is going to do it and when will the get it done?
Some Tips
Repurpose: Look at some of the older content that you have written. If the core of the message is still relevant but maybe some of it is outdated. Bring up to current, the parts of the piece that is outdated and republish the piece.
A second idea under the “repurpose” theme is to make some subtle changes to old content that could make it more relevant to a more specific or even a completely different customer segment.
Or, send some of your past content to a new distribution channel. Have you recently started sharing content with a new publisher or blog? Send this new publisher some of your older material. It may end up being “fresh” content for their audience.
Case Studies: Don’t always feel that you have to write an article from scratch. Sometimes you can tell a quick story about how you’ve helped one of your customers.
Idea Generators: Follow social feeds based on your industry to see what people are talking about and then write about that. As an example, take a look at Quora, filter it down to an industry or topics that your audience may be interested in and find out what people are talking about.