Content marketing does not equate to content marketing success

Every digital marketer is jumping on the content marketing band wagon, and with a huge collection of historical data available to us. It’s no wonder marketers have jumped this train, unaware of the paradox that exists in content marketing.

With a multitude of platforms available to us, social, email, web etc, its natural for marketers to want to adopt a more is more approach and flood these channels with copious amounts of content hoping for better traction.

With this multi-channel approach now becoming native to us, it’s no longer sparkly and new and it actually does have its downfalls, some of which are visible and some only in retrospect. What I mean by this is as this approach becomes normal to us, purely engaging in content marketing will not make you effective in it.

According to Nielsen’s Advertising & Audience Report, using TV as the analogy, TV has exploded across hundreds of channels, but this explosion in available channels did not increase engagement with TV in any way, in fact, whilst their viewing choices changed and varied the number of consistently viewed channels did not.

How is this significant to us in the digital game? Well is substantiates the belief that more is NOT more, and more content does not equate to more consumption. If you are not the best option for your consumer, and have real value for your consumer in your content then you’re wasting your time and your resources…

A formidable amount of brand generated social media content fails to generate engagement. The engagement thresholds for brand generated content are:

Twitter – Lowest – 73% of tweets receive 10 or fewer interactions

Instagram – Highest – only 10% of Instagram photos and 6% of Instagram videos receive 10 or fewer interactions, Instagram has the highest percentage of viral content, with 49% of Instagram photos and 60% of Instagram videos receiving more than 250 interactions.

Facebook has the second-highest percentage of content with more than 250 interactions (36%). Sponsored content accounted for the vast majority of posts with more than 250 interactions.

The iterative approach here would be to understand that in this continuously evolving digital landscape, content marketing is and will be the norm, that creating and publishing hordes of content on more channels will not get your brand heard. Understanding the platforms you are using is critical. Knowing your audience and your audience trends is also critical. Analytics present us with myriad ways and tools so we can track and tweak our efforts, use them. Having the right team and the best skill-set driving your online marketing campaigns is imperative.

Digital marketers have a real opportunity here as well as a challenge. In the first phases of creating content, analytics can empower marketers to change the course of the marketing strategy if need be in real time, for maximum long term impact, a “measure first” tactical approach is the only way forward. Reluctance or lack of knowledge in adopting a measure first approach may leave brands and marketers with huge content marketing spend and diminished ROI.