The folks over at Junta42 and Forrester had an interesting discussion. Here is Forrester’s take-away:
“The most interesting takeaway from the research is that overall advertising budgets will decline. Yep. With dollars moving out of traditional media toward less expensive and more efficient interactive tools, marketers will actually need less money to accomplish their current advertising goals.”
The key point illustrated is that the fastest areas of growth is social media. But talking about what you had for lunch does not attract interest. This is why content marketing is red-hot today. There is no point in spending one dime on social media unless you have remarkable content to share. (Remarkable content is exactly that – people remark to each other about it.)
Search marketing is also growing. But watch are people searching for. Again, we come back to content. So what should you do? Look at Junta42 and Kristen Halvorson of Brain Traffic for answers:
Okay, so what should you do with this? First off, stop thinking about content marketing or content strategy as the end deliverable. The content process is not just the video series, the enewsletter or the custom magazine. It’s the entire content strategy process, including (shout out to Kristina Halvorson from Brain Traffic on guidance here):
- The Content Audit. Before you usher in more content noise, it’s worth it to figure out what you have said. Anyone about to spend significant investment in content creation should develop a content benchmark first.
- The Content Plan. Who’s the audience?; What are their informational needs?; What are the success metrics of the content plan?; Who owns the plan?; What are the best content tactics?; How will we execute those tactics?;
- Content Maintenance. Once we create the content, how do we keep it fresh, updated, and continually monitor our customers’ informational needs so that we succeed with the content plan?
- Content Marketing. How are we distributing our valuable, relevant content so that we deliver on our success metrics?
The lesson for BtoB marketers is clear.
If you’re not making a major investment in Content Marketing in 2011, you will be left on the proverbial dust heap of history.
What do you think? We love comments and people who share.
“If more people listened to Jeff, a lot more would be sold.” Dan McDade, PointClear
