Content marketing has become a primary tactic for many marketers, and with good reason. Nearly three quarters (70%) of B2B buyers report that they rely more on content this year compared to the previous year. Modern marketers are looking for ways to stay ahead of the game by providing insightful content — at the right time — to their audience.
In a recent webinar, titled: The Future Of Content Marketing: How To Rise (And Stay!) Above The Noise, representatives from Marketo and Curata discussed the continuously changing content marketing landscape. They outlined the strategies and technologies needed to maintain the right content marketing mix going forward.
“Content is in a really exciting place right now, and marketers are starting to get buy-in from higher-ups because the industry is really starting to recognize the value of content,” said Maggie Jones, Content Marketing Specialist at Marketo.
Content marketing processes have to be incredibly agile, incredibly flexible and incredibly responsive to optimize its impact on the target audience, according to Jones.
“When you factor in rapidly evolving technology, the changing nature of SEO and the changing nature of how people fundamentally buy and sell things, content marketing — let’s say in 2024 — will take shape and make use of technology that doesn’t even exist yet,” said Jones. “That means that the best we can all do as marketers is figure out what our organizations are passionate about and what we’re good at and learn how to tell that story.”
Designating A Content Leader
Marketers can improve success rates by implementing a structured content marketing program. Having an executive to lead the content marketing team is a great start in building a robust content marketing mix and improving consistency and quality.
“From a strategy perspective, 43% of companies have a content marketing strategy executive,” said Michael Gerard, CMO of Curata. “So on one hand, that’s great; there are some folks that are putting that role in place. On the other hand, you have almost 60% of folks that do not have a content marketing strategy exec in place yet.”
An effective content marketing strategy can include a mix of original and curated content. Gerard said content curation is a suitable option for marketers to leverage previously created content as a way to save time and stay consistent.
“Even if we’re talking about it in our customer’s voice and we’re not talking about our own organization, we do need to bring in an external voice, external perspectives even if they’re different from our own perspectives,” said Gerard.” We need to bring that into our content marketing. So as content marketers, I think we’ve done a great job of moving beyond this product out and we’re at some of a content out right now. We need to shift some more market in.”
Content curation offers your content the credibility that comes with content created by thought leaders in the industry, while also saving marketers time and money.
“There a lot of companies out there that have embedded this curation into their content marketing practices and are getting a lot of benefit from it. The result was that they significantly increased their traffic, much, much higher quantity of leads going into their funnel and it had gained trust for their audience and increased their thought leadership.”
Click here for an on-demand version of this webinar.