As a business owner who's interested in generating leads for your business (and who isn't?) you can hardly fail to have noticed the industry's intense interest in content marketing.
Because your buyer's purchasing behaviour is changing and they are grazing for online content such as blogs, white papers, ebooks, case studies, industry trends, recommendations from their peers - really any piece of content that is going to interest, engage and inform them. It's content marketing's role to generate and distribute this content to your buyers.
Some of you may have spotted that this isn't exactly a new trend, after all whitepapers and case studies have been used for years in marketing campaigns.
But there are a couple of fundamental differences:
1) Content is so easily accessible and available with just a few characters typed into your favourite search engine, you must make sure people can find your stuff.
2) What you say has to be really interesting and engaging to cut through the barrage of information we are presented with every day. That means:
Short answer? Yes.
Consider this data from a survey done by the Content Management Institute and ADMA in March 2013, entitled Content Marketing in Australia: 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends.
Smart marketers are quickly figuring out the content marketing can be challenge to generate, which is probably why 57% of them are choosing to outsource content creation and that the larger the company the more often this task is outsourced with 80% of 1000+ companies choosing to outsource content creation.
Well, as it turns out, quite a lot.
Over half of us (53%) struggle to produce the kind of content that really engages. The trend is towards telling engaging and real stories about your target buyer's world, rather than self promotional clap-trap jammed full of corporate double speak and gobbledegook! This is very different than most of the current content that marketing produces.
Producing enough content is also a struggle for 51% of us (hint: see outsourcing above).
Aussie bosses are also a more skeptical bunch with 13% of them not buying into the content marketing vision being peddled by their head of marketing.
In a sign that the USA and UK markets maybe a little further up the content marketing maturity curve than their Australian counterparts, only 31% of B2B marketers view content marketing as effective or very effective; lower than their UK (39%) and USA (37%) based peers.
Feel free to contact us some advice on how to build a sensible approach to content marketing or if you would like to read some more download our eBook.
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