“According to Gartner surveys, content is the most important thing marketers can do and yet they’re unequipped to take it on from a skills and sourcing level.”
Source: www.gartner.com
Last week, Gartner released the results of their study around the 5 top emerging trends in digital marketing, and one of the big 5 is around the “rise of big content”.
Most marketers understand how important content is for their audience and their overall marketing strategy, but they critically lack resources/skills to either create good content or source good content to curate.
The choice of words Gartner used was very wise: we all know “marketers understanding that” does not mean “CEOs understanding that”. So just like most marketers, you might be facing a situation where you and anyone within your company who can and would write has millions of other things to do with deadlines that can’t be pushed.
In my opinion there are three answers you can bring to scale your content marketing and address the challenges created by the rise of big content:
1. The human-centric answer: leverage contributors to publish more content and distribute more broadly.
You can’t do it all alone, so why not leverage others in this ongoing effort? Co-workers and freelance writers can help you keep up with high goals for content publishing. If you are interested in how to leverage others in your content marketing efforts, I wrote an article about it last week.
2. The content-centric answer: leverage content curation to publish more content and be more credible.
People often think doing content marketing is 100% content creation. It’s not. There is great content out there on the Web just waiting for your to leverage it.
Consider the fact that it takes on average 150 hours to create a white paper or an ebook, 4 hours to write a blog post and 20 minutes to turn a relevant content into a curated post.
And it’s not just about finding the time or resources to write content, it’s also about publishing credible content. A study from the CMO council revealed that third-party content is 4x to 7x more trusted than your own.
3. The technology-centric answer: leverage content marketing software to save time through integration and automation.
Of course, we’re not objective on that part. But think about how CRM software changed the way we’re doing sales today. Think about how Marketing automation changed the way we’re sending emails by interacting with our prospects at the right time, based on their interactions with our website and their behaviors. In a similar way, Content Marketing software also saves marketers a lot of time which enables them to focus on what’s important.
To quote Gartner again: “Marketers need to build a content marketing supply chain and determine how to create, curate and cultivate content.”
Are you ready to adapt to the rise of big content?
And for more tips on how to scale your content marketing strategy with limited resources, download our free ebook.
Image by Jeff Rowley.
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Interesting infographic. We have a pretty clear buying funnel on some of our websites. Do you have any evidence to show that the “purchase funnel has been blown to bits”? How are you measuring the integrity of the funnel across many websites? or is this just hyperbole?
The point is that the funnel is not linear anymore because sellers don’t have asymmetrical knowledge monopoly anymore. 20 years ago, buying a car was a linear process: visit the dealership, discuss your needs, look at the models, review their details, narrow down to a couple of options, test drive them, etc… But now it’s completely different. A few months ago, we bought a new car with my wife: I already had checked everything I wanted online: the make, model and all the detailed options I wanted. We even knew from an online site how much or trade-in was worth.… Read more »