Marketers love their processes.
These structures help define where we are, where we need to go, and often provide guidance as to how we get there. From abstract creative thinking to nitty-gritty marketing budget balancing, we’re constantly searching for patterns to settle into. For the most part, this is a good instinct—consistent processes typically provide results you can expect, they offer easy ways to review and optimize steps along the way, and they keep people organized. But when it comes to redefining any of those structures as a whole, procedural thinking can turn into a marketer’s worst enemy.
I once worked with a client that, like many other small businesses, relied on an advertising-heavy model. Its blog didn’t tell stories, it held news and information about software updates. Its social media existed largely as a space to answer customer support questions and to host media for sponsored posting. To some extent, the process worked, and it was comfortable for the brand’s leadership. So it was discomforting to the brand’s senior leadership when their marketing team and myself suggested that if they wanted to continue to scale their audience, they would need to begin offering something beyond ads and products.
Content engines sound attractive in concept but present a paradigm shift for the large number of brands who have shifted toward them over the past 10 years. Time from concept to completion on promotional material often becomes longer, audience interaction and nurture becomes paramount, analytical approaches have to take a step to the left, and the marketing budget is completely flipped on its head.
Instead of small amounts of consistent spending with (hopefully) some immediate return, content marketing shifts the model toward more upfront spending, comparatively lower costs for promotion, and returns that take more time but compound into the future rather that dwindling off like advertisements. My client wasn’t unique in its response to this: excitement at the prospect, and resistance to the idea that it would require a fundamental shift in working paradigm.
So the company did what many brands do when moving to a content marketing model—it tried to change as little as possible. After all, if the old budget could still fit, if its old advertising creative workflow could work for blog content, or if its analytics platform didn’t need to be tweaked at all, leadership could save a lot of effort (and, therefore, time and money).
But the fact is, those old ways couldn’t sustain the company’s new direction. Realizing that, the team eventually tucked into the hard work of reorganizing their thinking, and the quality of their efforts improved to show for it. Leadership fell in line, content marketers rejoiced—and there, for my company and many companies just like it, the story ends.
Fast forward a few years to today, though, and many content marketers are talking about the need for quality storytelling. Today, it’s not enough for content to be informative—it has to be engaging. Yet many marketers dump the creation of stories into their old content pipelines and expect the best.
Storytelling, while content based, still represents a shift in the paradigms of content marketing.
Follow the Money
When it comes to your marketing budget—or perhaps more importantly, selling budget changes to leadership—its often useful to start with the state of the market.
According to research from StrongView and Selligent, marketing spend continues to rise across the board, with the top three channels being email marketing, social media, and display advertising. While all three of these can play a part in content marketing or story driven marketing, email and social tend to be far more integral in publishing and interacting around content than display tends to be. This would appear to tell us that both content marketers and advertisers are increasing their spend in 2016.
Resource: https://www.skyword.com/
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