Lots of thought visited your sales and marketing and marketing and sales communications plans, however – only a couple of a few days into 2012 – you start to question… Are you currently presently presently really outfitted for the challenges ahead?
Recent activity across the U.S. and worldwide stock markets, extreme weather patterns, the appearance elections – are all causing caution and pessimism regarding future purchases.
Additionally, today’s publication rack significantly completely different from the main one we have been acquainted with. Today’s buyers have become positive, searching for information prior to being buying. This buyer-driven atmosphere has boosted a massive amount of new (and often confusing) media strategies.
One of these brilliant, content marketing, has received center stage among B2C, Business to business and nonprofit marketers. But, despite its current recognition, questions remain – What content formats must be used? Let us repeat the content be? And, for instance, does content marketing really work?
Content Marketing Goals, Usage and Challenges
The newest study using the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs helps to ensure that marketers’ primary goals for applying content marketing would be to improve:
Prospecting
Sales
Brand awareness
Lead nurturing
Customer engagement and loyalty
Marketers see content marketing to get helpful for several purposes, that could indicate insufficient focus.
Confirming this, the research proven that lots of different formats were useful for content marketing efforts, with several kinds of marketers using different formats.
For instance, among both B2C and Business to business marketers the next content marketing formats were selected by almost all (80 to ninety percent):
Social networking, apart from blogs
Photos/illustrations
Enewsletters
Videos
Articles on website
In-person occasions, blogs and Infographics were also utilized by both groups, however with a smaller extent (60 to 80 percent).
Both groups were also susceptible to use webinars/webcasts a web-based-based presentations, however in this case these were well-loved by Business to business marketers. And, situation studies and white-colored-colored-colored papers were a lot more susceptible to help Business to business marketers in comparison with B2C marketers.
Unsurprisingly, because of the broadness within the goals for content marketing and all the different formats familiar with achieve these goals, marketers feel they’re ill outfitted to function during this new atmosphere. Their most pressing challenges are “producing engaging content”, “calculating content effectiveness”, “producing content consistently”, and “calculating the Return on investment of content marketing plans”. About one-third also mention “insufficient budget” and “producing numerous content”.
Past the challenges of content marketing itself, we are unable to escape the very fact the 2nd half of year contains an unparalleled amount of political advertising and, when the past is any predictor, it’ll most most likely be negative and raising much more the problem of “trust”. What might you, as being a marketer, do in order to offset this elevated pessimism and doubt being experienced your clients and prospects?
