The Growing Importance of Content Marketing

For most companies we talk to, content marketing is becoming a bigger priority. Content is needed across many areas of the business and serves the purposes of engaging, informing, convincing, and selling to your target audience. Since it is so important and needs to be implemented across so many marketing channels, it is important to take content development seriously. Content is not only text, it should be a mixed media combination of mostly text but also imagery and video.

Building a plan for content marketing should be included in your immediate and long term goals. It has become painfully obvious that short cuts and cheap content won’t cut it. Investing in good quality content is going to be key to make it work for any company whether you are B2B, B2C, offer products or services; all businesses need to supply content that will engage customers.

Of course, content goals will be different for each business, but below is a handy visual aide to help show you where the organizational goals for B2B content marketing fell in a survey about content marketing trends for 2015 from the North America Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs:

Here is a list of more general goals that you can internalise and prioritise according to your own needs:

• Educating and Informing
• Thought Leadership / Establishing Your Authority
• Entertaining
• Reputation Management
• Interacting and Engaging Your Community
• Improving the Customer Experience
• Optimizing Marketing Efficiency

If you are working on formulating a plan and goals for your content marketing, these 3 questions from content marketing evangelist Doug Kessler can help you out:

1. “What content would I produce if I didn’t need this job?”
2. “What do I dare not say but really believe to be true?”
3. “What could I say that would actively alienate our worse prospects while attracting our best?”

These 3 questions might be forward thinking or even controversial, but it is definitely something to think about to help you formulate a content plan. Sometimes it is important to ask the hard questions to arrive at the best solutions.