The Opportunity Cost of Poorly-Performing Content
Content marketing is first and foremost an exercise in relationship-building. And like any relationship worth maintaining, content creation is hard.
There are a variety of measures of success for a single piece of content, from social shares and unique visits to time on page and lead conversions. But no matter how you score your content, creating and distributing content without an upfront focus on relationship-building is a poor investment of resources.
As Kapost’s Jesse Noyes put it in our influencer survey on the future of content marketing, the biggest content marketing mistake is not having a content strategy in place:
“Every year a survey comes out, and every year I’m shocked. Most marketers don’t have a documented content strategy, yet most everyone is doing content marketing. I don’t care what you tell me – if you don’t have an actual written strategy, you don’t know what you’re doing.
[This] includes some rudimentary but neglected steps like establishing clear workflows, addressing specific buyer personas, collaborating across teams, regions, product lines, and actually analyzing the impact on your marketing and sales pipeline.
If you don’t sit down and jot out what your specific themes, goals and team are, your content is just an ad hoc exercise in ‘being busy.'”
The ultimate goal of content marketing is to build resonance with your audience. Granted, a single piece of content may not make or break a sale, but content that is missing the mark acts a deterrent to prospective customers. Therein lies the challenge with maintaining a consistent brand message — if your content is inconsistent in quality, your competitor may start to look that much better in comparison.
Here are a few ways that consistent brand messaging and an effective content strategy can affect your company’s bottom line.
Quality Content And The Bottom Line
There is much debate about the various ways to measure the effectiveness of content via its impact on leads, conversions, and revenue. But for many organizations, the first step towards an effective content strategy is simply accepting that content has an impact on the bottom line.
According to the annual Internet Trends report from Mary Meeker, a former Morgan Stanley internet analyst turned Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers partner, content is the cornerstone between community and commerce. In her 2014 presentation, Meeker referred to the 3 C’s —content, community, and commerce — as the “Internet Trifecta.”
Meeker used home design and decorating ideas portal Houzz as an example for how building symbiosis between these three C’s can create a “critical mass of content.” Houzz has managed to generate millions of monthly views to its community and content resources, and link them directly to its inventory of home goods, making the discovery and purchase of products more efficient. According to Meeker, this three C’s formula is the underlying strategy behind Houzz’s success in disrupting the home goods market.
Another of Meeker’s 2014 Internet Trends centers around the reimagining of distribution channels and content. As Meeker highlighted (and many other studies have reiterated), social distribution can happen quickly, and for many brands and publications, creating quality content is meaningless without a strategy for the distribution and promotion of that content. As HubSpot’s VP of Content Joe Chernov has stated, content marketers often focus too much on the content creation stage:
“Marketers always ask me how to make more or better content, and it’s almost always the wrong question. The right question is: ‘How do I get my content in front of the right people?'”
Even venerable publications like The New York Times have struggled to connect the dots between quality content creation and content distribution. It is nice to think that high-quality content will organically populate and multiply across social channels without the help of promotional tools, but according to data scientist Brian Abelson, that notion is naïve.
Abelson spent 2013 analyzing web data for The New York Times, and found that the simple act of tweeting out an article from a NYT twitter handle had a profound effect on pageviews.
Image via http://brianabelson.com/
The New York Times‘ major disconnect between content creation and proper distribution and SEO tactics featured prominently in the takeaways from their digital Innovation Report, which was leaked to the public earlier this year.
So here’s the bottom line on content marketing and your company’s bottom line: the investment in content marketing won’t pay off unless it is approached with intention from creation through distribution. Content marketing is a long-term play, and requires a strategy with a holistic approach to relationship-building.
Want more content marketing tips? Download our COLOSSAL CONTENT MARKETING REPORT for insights into headline optimization, publishing frequency, social distribution, and more.
Kara Burney is the Content Marketing Maven at TrackMaven, the Competitive Intelligence platform for Digital Marketers. Have content marketing questions or topics you'd like covered on the TrackMaven blog? Tweet her your ideas! See more of Kara's posts
