Content Marketing is taking over the Marketing Industry

Let me start with the bottom line:
If you are narrow minded to "traditional" marketing techniques, your chances of succeeding with your brand promotion are also narrow.

In 2014, Content is critical to creating successful campaigns and promoting your business.

Facts:

- 27,000 pieces of content are shared each day.
- 90% of brands market with content.
- 75% of marketers think branded content is more effective than printed advertising, direct mailing and PR.























Is it clear now why are we moving towards content marketing?

More than 350 million people read blogs.
Blogs give websites more indexed pages and indexed links, which means they help the websites show up in search engine results.
So blogs are the most valuable content type of marketing. 

So if you're wondering why a website is not enough anymore, why do most brands blog an awful lot, that's because they get 5 times more traffic than brands that don't blog and report 97% more leads.


Think about it:
What do you see most on your Facebook or Twitter feed?
Shared links, right? but not just any links... what is shared is content from reputable sources. and you find yourself sharing some of that content too, don't you often do that? Because you listen to recommendations from friends.

99% of people are sharing via multiple platforms of social media, which results in a purchase.

Not only do marketers use social media to distribute content, but actually users prefer to connect with brands on Facebook.
If you look closely on people's behaviours (including yours) they spend more than 80% of their time online where content can be shared.

Do they follow brands because they love advertising?
Hell no!
They do it because the content is interesting. They prefer to know a company via articles over ads.
They prefer a company who's interested in building a relationship with them rather than giving them full-text content. If they were to read, they read from a brand they are interested in and therefore they feel more positive about it.

What does this tell us?
People want to be in control of the content they wish to receive:
86% of people skip TV commercials
44% of direct mail is never opened and 91% of people unsubscribe from them.

Coming to know this, would you still spend a fortune on TV commercials and traditional media?

Here's a simple example:
If you're planning a trip to Paris, are you more likely to check commercials of hotels in magazines (or even online) or do you check forums and blogs where people rate the hotels and share their reviews?

Switch to content already!

Marketers are spending nearly 1/3 of their budgets on content marketing, and they say they will increase their content marketing spending in the next year, baring in mind that it costs almost 60% less than traditional marketing.

And make your content interesting!

90% of the information assimilated by the brain are visual. Aren't you more interested in articles with images or video? In fact people respond better to images than plain text, and 3 times more to video.
How many videos do you watch daily on your smart phone? At least once a day, right? Even my mom shares with me a video daily.
Why do we invest so much in a website design? Because it gives the brand or company more credibility.


Finally, it's OK to be traditional in 2014, as long as traditional means content marketing.

All the stats in this article are from @NewsCred who power content for the world's leading brands.

Traditional v.s Digital advertising: CONTENT MARKETING

At some point in my career, I was excited to work with a digital agency, I thought it must be the new dimension that I lack.
Eager to learn "digital", my experience started with words like "lead generation", "content", "traffic", "SEO" etc...
IT GOT ME OUT OF MY MIND! I was unable to grasp the meaning of these words and thought we didn't speak the same language...

After a while, I discovered that all there is to it  is to apply the same principle I have always been using in traditional advertising, online.

For instance, what we call "target audience" and base our communication platform on, is called in digital language "lead generation". It's a database that consists of the names and addresses (or emails) of individuals/ corporations to obtain information for the purpose of expanding the scope of business, increasing sales, conducting specialised research, etc...
In traditional communication you advertise where your target audience is.
In digital you buy "leads" or get them from unpaid sources and target your consumers directly.

In traditional advertising, you measure the ROI of your marketing i.e the contribution that the advertising campaign had on revenue and profits, plus the awareness it created among people.
In digital, you measure the effectiveness of content marketing: it is the intersection of awareness and lead generation.

So CONTENT MARKETING is a key in today's marketplace.
It certainly competes with traditional advertising. It has changed the way consumers research and buy products, that's why advertising agencies are increasing their budgets for content marketing because it helps them expand their reach online.

In advertising language :) to better explain Content, it can take many forms:
Articles, blog posts, editorials, email campaigns, newsletters, web content, info graphics, illustrations, photos, videos, tutorials, FAQs, webinars, e-books, etc....
The goal from all the above is to attract and retain customers.

An article that I read on marketo shows 4 reasons why companies should use content marketing:

Content marketing process in 6 easy steps: Source

1- Identify marketing objectives (benchmark)
2- Understand your buyers (define buying process stages)
3- Identify gaps (what is most appropriate at each stage of the buying process? what is more important for buyers? what assets are missing?)
4- Build content (key messages to deliver - set a standard for quality - consistency)
5- Organize distribution (select the right channels - facilitate social sharing - build landing pages)
6- Measure ROI (measure Web traffic, sales lead quality & social media sharing)

How can we measure the effectiveness of content marketing?

According to Pam Dyer, Common measurements include:
- Subscribers
- Fans
- Likes
- Traffic
- SEO: your ranking and visibility + search as a traffic source.
- Leads: Their quality and lifetime value
- Conversations: Sales, Subscribers and leads.
- Sales: Volume, financial value and lenght of the sales cycle
- Acquisition costs for users, leads and sales.





Bottom line, Content marketing grows your bottom line.
It builds awareness, exposes new people to your brand.
It inspires potential customers to engage, read, download, comment, share, etc...
It amplifies traditional word of mouth and grows organically with time.

To ensure the success of a content marketing strategy, we could measure the following:
- ranking in search engine results pages
- Number of first-time website visitors
- Total page views
- Visit durations
- Social metrics: Likes, follows, +1s, pins, etc...
- Social media referrals from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc...

The folks at BrandPoint illustrated it using the below infographic:

If you come from the same background, and digital language at some point was a foreign language to you, I hope the picture is clearer now. Because Once you go digital, there's no way back.

Cheers!