Content marketing has become one of the trendy strategies among companies. In recent years, it has been talked about non-stop and its potential has been repeated over and over again. Content marketing has become fashionable for many reasons. On the one hand, traditional methods have stopped working. On the other, consumers expect more and more from brands and want increasingly valuable things from them. They expect brands to offer added value in their messages and for those messages to be something more than simple advertising.
That is why brands are not only talking about the subject and researching the potential of content marketing — they have also become enthusiastic advocates of it. Brands have rushed en masse to embrace these tools and create content. If this is trendy and other companies are seeing results, why not use it ourselves to reach and capture those consumers?
And that is exactly what is happening. A study by Beckon has just analysed what brands are doing in terms of marketing strategy and how well — or not — their activities are paying off. The most popular tactics, the study authors note, are not — at least according to the data — the ones delivering the best results once the numbers are analysed. And this applies to the increasingly popular field of content marketing too.
"Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the current belief that brands need to be content machines is not supported by the data," explains Jennifer Zeszut, CEO of Beckon. According to the study data, content creation by brands has grown by 300%, yet consumer engagement with that content has remained virtually flat. In other words, brands are devoting enormous resources to content and working very hard in this area, but they are not achieving the response they may have expected.
Consumers are not responding to content in general, and more specifically, they are not responding to the fresh new content that is now appearing.
Why this is happening
According to the study data, the content marketing boom and its harvest of results is far from democratic. Just 5% of branded content captures 90% of the engagement generated by all content marketing. The rest — the remaining 95% of content — achieves miserable view counts and engagement figures.
The companies themselves are partly to blame. The content they are publishing does not have the expected quality and is falling well short of what consumers might love. Add to that the fact that everything is being so saturated that a sense of excess is being created.
In general, it could be said that brands do not fully understand what this trend is about or how to capitalise on its success. Consumers want content and are willing to receive it, but they are not willing to accept it at any price and in any form. Brands want content that truly brings something to the table — they will not simply accept anything.
Before jumping in, brands need to think about what they have to say and, above all, how what they say or do will impact consumers. It is not enough to talk for the sake of it — you need to know what you are saying.
