The future advances on us whether we adapt to it or not. And the future for marketers — especially B2B marketers — is indisputably going to include more and more content.
In fact, the future is here. A recent study from the Content Marketing Institute showed that 90 percent of B2B marketers do some kind of content marketing, whether they know it or not. And many marketers are having trouble keeping up — the same study found that 62 percent of companies outsource part or all of their content needs.
And done right, it pays off. Search engines and content consumers both reward companies that provide meaningful, useful content. Key words: Meaningful and useful — no one likes to be served up what is essentially content spam. In fact, Google has committed to improvements in its algorithms to “punish” with lower search rankings what it deems to be thin content sites, such as content farms. As Erik Kain noted on Forbes.com, “originality, sincerity, and quality are much more important than making sure you get the right SEO tricks down.”*
But content as a marketing tool is a hungry beast. Because of the exploding use of (and demand for) quality content, good content marketing needs a strategic approach — a disciplined practice of planning content creation, delivery, governance and resource allocation. In essence, marketing professionals need to think like publishers in the way they create and distribute content.
Enter Movéo’s new content offering.
At its heart is the concept of COPE — Create Once, Publish Everywhere. That means moving from one-off content creation to a strategic process for developing and publishing content. Assets, topics, vehicles and timing for content should be considered holistically before pen gets put to paper to develop a blog post, video concept or white paper.
Pie in the sky, you say? You say you don’t have a blank canvas on which to paint a lovely, best-practice content marketing program? No problem. No one does, unless they are starting their whole company on a blank canvas.
The first step in content marketing strategy is to do an audit of what already exists, with an eye to leveraging anything that can be leveraged. COPE is about working smarter and not harder on content marketing — using and repurposing whatever wheels have already been invented — as well as developing new and purpose-driven content.
The crucial elements of content strategy are familiar ones: 1) clearly identifying the goal to be achieved, and 2) developing a plan to get there. What can be challenging is focusing on what goals are achievable and understanding all the pieces of the content planning puzzle.
But with an audit, a goal and a plan, efficient and steady publishing of quality content is within reach for any marketing department.
Movéo’s content offering is designed to provide a turnkey solution to this challenge. We offer services at every phase of the content marketing cycle — from assessment of content possibilities to content creation and distribution. We hope you’ll join us as we explore content marketing both in our business and here on Get There.
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