Why Content Marketing Must Be a Core Competency

In this increasingly digital world, how consumers and buyers stay current on topics, form opinions, and navigate decisions has changed dramatically – and the change continues. Not surprisingly, companies are learning that digital content can be used in creative ways to engage with clients, differentiate their value proposition and drive revenue growth. That’s why content marketing has become a leading competitive differentiator, and when done right, is how organizations can quickly achieve significant results.

WHAT IT IS AND WHY IT MATTERS

Maintaining a consistent and strategic digital presence is critical when it comes to finding and converting new customers, as well as driving repeat business from existing ones. While a solid marketing mix is still required, content marketing is winning the front-line battle for new clients and repeat business due to its alignment with emerging communication preferences and superior bang for the buck. Content marketing has rapidly become more than a nice-to-have and is of utmost strategic importance when companies battle for position within competitive markets.

Let’s start by establishing a general understanding of what we mean by “content marketing.”

Promotional marketing, like advertising, or your company website, or a press release, is about creating content you want people to see, or push-marketing.

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and ultimately profitable customer action.” — CMI

Content marketing is different; it is pull-marketing. It is content your targeted audience seeks out — It connects people’s interests to topics that relate to your product or service. It nurtures discussion and communities that solve problems, elucidates situations, or articulates recommended alternatives. It establishes your credibility and involves you in the discussion. Like a trail of breadcrumbs, it lays down a path people can actively follow based on their own interests and objectives.

Content can be a primary factor in defining customer experience, which is the journey target audiences typically follow to experience a designated value proposition relative to competing alternatives. When done correctly, value propositions considers the entire customer journey, including how they learn, form opinions, take action, solve problems, build preferences, refer to others, engage communities, etc. The role that content marketing plays in creating and shaping a customer’s experience of value is not necessarily obvious unless you recognize that a customer’s journey doesn’t start and end when they buy a product or service.

Content marketing is the means by which your brand is infused into the broader experience of value, and vice-versa. For example, if Brand X uses content marketing to help their market connect with resources for understanding pro’s and con’s of certain features, innovative ideas for using their product, and communities that support new users, the experience of value will be that Brand X helps clients learn, make decisions and maximize the value of their product. The brand is defined by the customer experience. Content marketing helps deliver targeted experiences of value across all many steps of the customer’s journey.

Let’s now consider intriguing statistics related to how the market’s journey has become primarily digital, depending more than ever on content to fuel the experience of value:

• As of January 2019, almost 4.4 billion people worldwide were active internet users and 3.5 billion were social media users. (Statista 2019)
• 26% of U.S. adults are almost always online — part of the 77% of U.S. adults who go online daily (Pew Research)
• Last year, there were 243.6 million social network users in the U.S. or about three-quarters of the country’s population. (Pew Research)
• Social media usage accounts for 21.4% of total mobile minutes in the U.S., a trend driven by social media apps and mobile messengers. (Statista 2019)
• E-commerce now accounts for 13% of total retail sales when factoring out the sale of items not normally purchased online, such as fuel, automobiles and sales in restaurants. In the last decade, the web has more than doubled its share of retail sales. (U.S. Commerce Department)
• Growth in e-commerce sales is 5x higher than in-store commerce and the rate is continuing to climb. (U.S. Census Bureau)
• 58% of respondents said social media influences their purchasing decisions in 2018, compared to 45% in 2016. (SUMO Heavy’s Social Commerce Survey)
• Across a variety of industries, 92% of 18-34-year-olds say they seek recommendations from friends and family when considering a purchase – this figure is 80% for the general population. (Nielsen’s Harris Poll Online)
• Generation Z (born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s) will represent 40% of the consumer market by 2020. This generation is expected to spend twice as much mobile time shopping than millennials. (Entrepreneur)
• Some 88% of 18- to 29-year-olds indicate they use some form of social media. That share falls to 78% among those ages 30 to 49, to 64% among those ages 50 to 64 and to 37% among Americans 65 and older. (Pew Research)

While factors certainly vary across different industries, regions, and business vs consumer markets, a common conclusion can be made: the success of an organization wanting to find and keep customers now largely hinges on its ability to create and manage digital content. This should be done strategically, consistently and with an understanding of the role it plays in achieving desired business outcomes.

An effective content marketing strategy will structure and deploy a measured atmosphere of news, information, and social media that is, and isn’t many things:

Good Content Marketing isn’t…	It is…
a uni-directional, clarion call to action.	an indirect approach that opens up pathways to awareness and interaction.
ad-hoc, with whatever resources are available.	structured, with defined processes, ownership and publishing calendar.
distributing already generated content to whatever audiences we listen.	finding and generating relevant content specifically for targeted segments.
directly linked to ROI and easily measured.	clear on what value is delivered, despite challenges in measuring direct outcomes.

THE CHALLENGES ARE THE OPPORTUNITIES

Content marketing done well is a discipline. It is the telling of a story, even if implicit, that continuously interacts with target segments. It acknowledges critical perspectives and competing alternatives, as well as celebrates wins, discoveries and benchmarks, which beckon clients to join the ride. In this age of digital transformation, making communication relevant and engaging can’t be done haphazardly, or as I often hear: left to disconnected interns or the media savvy kids of company employees.

Unfortunately, achieving this does not necessarily happen easily or organically. Content marketing is not a simple template that can be laid over an existing paradigm – it can have a transformational effect when organized and integrated into business functions and job responsibilities, influencing KPIs and performance reviews. That’s because the best content is not just another form of marketing, but rather: effective holistic communication that reflects the DNA of your business. It displays an awareness of the challenges and opportunities faced by your targeted segments. It is interactive based on conversations happening real-time with customers, industry influencers, and at different levels and departments of the company.

An important story emerges from statistics showing how companies view and approach these challenges.

• 62% of the most successful content marketers have a documented strategy, compared to just 16% of the least successful ones. This means you are nearly 4x more likely to be successful if you have a proper strategy in place. (CMI’s Benchmark Study)
• 45% of marketers identify content and experience management as a top priority for their organization. (Econsultancy global survey of 12,795 marketing, creative and technology professionals)
• Top-performing companies are 50% more likely than their peers to have well-designed user journeys that facilitate clear communication and a seamless transaction. (69% vs. 46%). (Econsultancy global survey)
• 50% of surveyed companies admit data is not being utilized properly across the marketing department. (SEMRush)
• 72% of respondents to CMI’s 2018 Content Management & Strategy Survey say their organization is challenged with managing their content strategically.

Companies now have a unique opportunity to more effectively find clients, build community, and engage markets with relevant information they deliberately and strategically publish. It involves a learning curve, so getting started sooner than later can help you build new capabilities to differentiate your value from competing alternatives. Maintaining a disciplined approach has the potential to turn challenges associated with society’s digital transformation into opportunities that drive new business growth.

Other primary benefits include:

• Enable pass-along. We know content is the means by which purchase decisions are influenced. Content marketing isn’t about pushing a sale, so it can easily be forwarded to individuals or communities. Pass-along facilitates awareness, knowledge, and action.
• Reach new customers. As your content filters through the web and is further forwarded by communities and people to friends, family, and coworkers, it reaches many more new potential customers. When something goes viral, this potential skyrockets.
• Build your credibility. New customers, especially for large ticket items, want to know you are the real deal. Having a strong brand, bolstered by related content, helps build that confidence to support both pass-along and purchase decisions.
• Maintain visibility. Clearly, if you are making a sustained effort to promote content of value, your visibility in the marketplace will be established and maintained.
• Get press & interviews. Increased visibility through quality content doesn’t just reach more potential clients, it reaches press and industry publications that can also amplify your voice. PR agencies have changed their processes knowing that just like you or me, news organizations can perform a web search to find interesting news and perspectives.
• Boost your SEO. Search engine algorithms rate the relevance of keywords in content relative user’s search terms, as well as other data related to quality, interesting information, such as the duration visitors stay on your site, pages viewed, inbound and outbound links, etc. Content you generate should integrate with your website where possible, increasing attractiveness to search engines and clients.
• Build followers & leads. An obvious outcome of content being pushed out and passed along will be to build up the number of interested potential clients who want to learn more.
• Increase touch-points. Industry experts say that it takes 6-8 touch-points on average to close a sale. In the digital age, the purchase path is more complex, often requiring more research and information to drive a decision. Content marketing facilitates this process.
• Grow lifetime revenue. We all know the game is to both find and keep customers. Marketing strategies for accomplishing this often fail because keeping a customer engaged takes investment, strategy, and effort. Adobe Digital Index’s market study shows that in the U.S., 40% of e-commerce revenue comes from repeat purchasers, who represent only 8% of all visitors to a site. Marketers must bring in five new shoppers to equal the revenue of one repeat purchaser. Your content marketing can play a critical role in bringing those most desirable and profitable customers back since you know who they are and can better target their needs across a lifetime of engagement.

With these benefits you can achieve, along with supporting data, marketers should take a serious look at their own content marketing strategy and, if appropriate, begin to invest in moving up the learning curve. Not establishing a content marketing strategy could mean you are choosing to wait until competitors have achieved superiority in using it as a way to enhance their own brand, and achieve a differentiated experience of value for their customer’s journey.

To learn more about how you can overcome frequent challenges and get started with more effective content marketing, read: 6 Pivots to Step Up Your Content Marketing Game. 

About Avenir Consulting Group:

Driving an ongoing conversation with meaningful content is now a critical sales-driver, but companies often lack the process, expertise, and resources to effectively surface, coordinate and publish the stories, data, knowledge, and activities that can be sourced from across the organization.

Avenir Consulting Group offers a range of content marketing services that help you update your content strategy, create and organize targeted content, publish it, then promote it. Services enable you to establish and effectively maintain a flow of content that can be utilized across sales & marketing channels to drive awareness, engagement, and conversion.

Partner with Avenir to outsource aspects of content production that make sense for your organization. The outcome: a content funnel that attracts and engages targeted customers to deliver more value, increase your installed base, and boost overall revenue potential.