Marketing managers tout the phrase “content is king” like a mantra. But not everything that glitters is gold: a lot of content just disappears in the abyss of the Internet because customers just ignore it due to its low quality. This guide aims to face the problems in content marketing and shows how Digital Asset Management can help.
Table of Contents
What is content marketing and what can it do?
Compared to classical advertising, content marketing looks at customers from a different angle. While the brand and product are usually in the forefront, content marketing centers around the target groups themselves. Their interests and aims are the focus.
Marketing managers are now facing major challenges. Different analysis tools provide them with a wealth of information about their customers. They get to know their customer groups better every day. But the art is in creating customized content with the appropriate approach and target group at the right time and place. The goal of content marketing is to provide interesting and useful content, whether it’s case studies, videos, white papers, success stories or blog articles.
91% of B2B marketers say they use content marketing in their overall strategy.
The consumed content should pay off for the brand, lead to purchases, and ultimately increase revenue. And it works. 91% of B2B marketers say they use content marketing in their overall strategy, and 92% of them say their organization views content as a business asset.
Content marketing doesn’t refer to campaign measures that pay off after a few months. It takes time and patience to identify target groups to provide them with the right message, so the desired results are achieved, such as closing a deal or selling a product.
The status quo in content marketing
Content marketing is a well established term in the industry. Marketing divisions are investing a lot of time and resources in videos, blogs, white papers and infographics. The Internet has almost been flooded with content. Customers often receive much more information than they need, and content production is still growing while customer attention remains the same.
Companies are in this regard increasingly becoming content publishers, and the competition continues to grow.
Content quality
Despite investments in real content engineering, disillusionment is huge. According to a survey, 60% of the content that brands offer is poorly produced. Today, customers expect high-resolution photos, animations, videos, 3D graphics and, above all, exciting stories. Customers often feel that companies don’t really get it. As a result, they associate poor content with a bad customer experience. This in turn damages the brands and comes to sinking sales figures. All the money, time and resources haven’t generated any added value. No marketing manager can justify such numbers.
60% of content brands offer their customers is poorly produced.
Media discontinuity
The struggle of the marketing divisions with digital attention is split across increasingly more channels. Beyond company and product websites, customers use different channels such as Instagram, YouTube, blogs and rating platforms to get information and make purchases. People rarely read a long text on a phone, but a video should be easily available.
The distribution of content in the right form is becoming as crucial as the quality. A study by Ligatus shows that anyone who wants to reach new customers needs to be where the customers really are. The most efficient thing is to publish directly in the respective channels. Numerous platforms also mean that there are often media discontinuity in the message or in the images. The result is that the brand no longer delivers a consistent message and a consistent impression.
Only premium content is king
Companies only stand out from the flood of information, if they use new target-group analysis and better-quality content. High-quality content consists of creative ideas and exciting stories that really interest the customers and involves many people, including marketing managers, photographers, copywriters, agencies, and product managers.
The key to a high-quality result is good collaboration between those involved. And the content has to be at the center here. Previously, there have been countless friction losses because of deficient communication, unclear structures and the use of countless applications such as email, Slack, Dropbox, or Basecamp.
To increase productivity, you need a tool that combines the following requirements:
- Gather all participants around one virtual table
- Distribute and organize tasks
- Sync files on all devices
- Integrate your most important creative tools such as Adobe Photoshop and InDesign
This tool allows marketing projects to organize themselves and avoid error sources. For example, an agency sends a low-resolution image. Through a series of unfortunate coincidences, the image ends up in the online store. The potential customer gets annoyed by the quality and dismisses the product.
Time is an additional factor. Today, companies can’t just think in terms of campaigns, they have to respond to spontaneously occurring needs.
Agile marketing, for which CELUM offers tools as well, requires a quick response. Bottlenecks in content creation become especially evident. The graphic designer doesn’t receive clear instructions and ultimately delivers the wrong version. In the hustle and bustle, there is no approval process and the image ends up on Twitter. The response? “Great intentions, but poorly executed.”
Communication and easy cooperation are the foundation for success in content marketing to significantly accelerate the workflow, avoid error sources and achieve high quality in content. Luckily, there are many tools that can help you in your content marketing efforts.
An omnichannel experience with a central content hub
What happens with finished content? It needs to be shared. But before this takes place, marketing managers should think about Digital Asset Management (DAM). You can learn more about what Digital Asset Management is and why your organization might need it here.
The analyst firm Forrester Research confirms that DAM is a key pillar in the architecture of the content marketing experience. That’s because it offers integration with many other systems such as web content management, marketing automation tools and e-commerce applications. In addition, DAM is the crucial piece of the puzzle for managing content across multiple systems.
DAM offers the opportunity to systematically associate keywords with content, which is especially important for images. The tagging brings considerable visibility in search engines, and you won’t lose content in the endlessness of the digital universe. Investing in a DAM saves costs and resources.
“The cost of not doing this is 10 times greater than we realized”, says Shawn Burns, Senior Vice President of Digital Schneider Electric.
In today’s world, it is no wonder, that budgets for digital content are growing rapidly. Brands are producing more content, but at the same time, visibility and discoverability are all the most important. The likelihood also increases that valid licenses won’t be on hand for the content when the structures are chaotic. This can happen easily with third-party images. Consequently, it increases the risk of lawsuits for copyright infringement, which can quickly cost millions.
A DAM solution protects against licensing and copyright infringement.
DAM is also a valuable aid for distributing content and supports numerous publishing possibilities. Marketers can precisely plan when to distribute content on which channels. This is a paradigm shift. In the past, companies spent 80% of the budget on content creation and only 20% on distribution. A ratio that will likely reverse as more paid content dominates the online landscape.
Conclusion
Anyone who wants to prove themselves in content marketing has to rely on teamwork and quality. The foundation for this is a digital infrastructure that gets more from content – from creation and management to distribution. This is the basis for efficient work and high-quality content that offers the customer a brand and product experience. It’s now possible to buy exciting brand content and sell your own marketing materials again. This relieves pressure on marketing managers’ budgets and also generates new target groups – and your brand will shine even brighter.
