The only relevant trend in content marketing: strategy!
Despite all the technical, operational and creative innovations, despite all the storytelling or native advertising - there is only one thing that is truly indispensable, without which companies will not achieve sustainable success in content marketing: STRATEGY! Even in the USA, not even 40% of companies have a documented strategy - although 90% of companies say they do "content marketing". And the situation is no different in Germany: Here the figure is just under 43 percent. And something has to change here. A trend is a particularly profound and sustainable development - and if there's one area of content marketing that needs it, it's strategy.
In the medium term, content marketing means a radical change in perspective, working methods and processes within companies. New skills are needed, teams have to be reorganized, budgets have to be shifted and tools have to be purchased. None of this is rocket science, but it all needs to be well planned.
Strategy is a necessity of the market
And this is not a question of claims by some consultants - but a very simple necessity of the market. Companies are facing tough competition in the content sector. It is in the nature of things that disciplines professionalize after a certain start-up time. And it is a market law that those market participants who cannot offer the same performance and quality as other market participants will not be able to hold their own in the market. And producing good content is time-consuming and expensive - nobody can afford to try things out blindly.
In concrete terms, "strategy" means 7 steps:
- The art of combining your own interests with added value for the customer ("content value")
- Identify good topics creatively as well as methodically and based on data, collect them and evaluate them according to fixed criteria, including social signals ("content discovery")
- Clear planning of content with topics, personas and timings ("content planning")
- Well-organized workflows in content production with decent briefings, and a technically clean implementation, both journalistically and in terms of SEO ("content production")
- Efficient and individualized publishing of content in a variety of channels - in the right channels for the content ("content publishing")
- Targeted promotion of content when necessary, as much as possible but no more than necessary. Because "promotion" costs money. ("Content promotion")
- And last but not least, a meaningful analysis of the performance of the published content, both in terms of operational key figures (views, shares, comments, etc.) and strategic key figures, especially conversion, the results of which are then incorporated into the strategy ("content analytics").
Considerable pent-up demand
Most companies have a considerable (!) need to catch up in all of these areas, others (a few) only in some. But there is considerable potential in all of these areas to increase effectiveness and avoid wasting money. And in many cases, this also requires a significant reorganization of the marketing and communications departments.
