Web design and branding companies are pushing content marketing as a preferred strategy for brands looking to increase lead generation, educate the market and improve brand awareness. At the heart of many successful content-focused marketing plans is the notion of creating “non-promotional content”. This is a major paradigm shift for most companies who are used to producing self-promotional or sales-oriented material. Understanding the true value of non-promotional content is the first step needed to buy into and develop a successful content marketing program.
Marketers are now telling small- and medium-sized companies that it’s time to create content. The question is, what’s the best type of content to create? Well, if you’re using the current state of the market, it looks like video is the way to go. Almost 87% of marketing agencies polled by Outbrain said that they have developed video content for their clients, while 67% developed blog posts. Next on the list of content marketing were articles and photo galleries.
It’s important to note that 100% of agencies polled implemented some type of content marketing for their clients.
Once content is created, marketers have to determine the best way to present it to consumers. Not surprising, social media tops the list in terms of popular content distribution methods with 96% of marketers. YouTube and Vimeo are very popular venues for storing and sharing videos, while Facebook and Twitter are used to broadcast the message and direct potential viewers to the appropriate landing pages. Next we find SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and display advertising at 78% and 76% respectively.
We previously discussed that lead generation, thought leadership and brand awareness are the top 3 goals of B2B content marketers in 2011 and 2012. Marketers use several methods of for measuring the success of their content marketing efforts. Social media engagement and/or referrals lead the way, followed by view/downloads of content, leads generated, referrals from search and finally direct sales.
Content marketing is used by brands looking to increase engagement with their target audience. Videos, blog posts and articles are the top types of content created by marketers as of January of 2012. Measuring success is an important step in a complete marketing plan and some agencies are already looking for sentiment analysis to evaluate the social media impact of the created content.
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