There was a time when click through rates for display banners averaged over 5%, they are now down at about 0.06%. When Gary Vaynerchuk spoke at IMUK14 this year he said back in the early 2000’s the open rate on his newsletter was above 80%, email open rates now average about 20%.
The challenge for marketers is anything that works is adopted on mass and scaled until the results start to erode.
This is true of content marketing as well. The phrase “content is king” has been abused to death by marketers over the past 3 to 5 years. With 27,000,000 pieces of content shared everyday, that’s a whole lot of kings. It’s hard to maintain your value when you’re one of so many.
Content marketing by its very nature also poses a challenge for itself. Good content marketers produce educational content telling the world how to do content like them. This increases the pool of marketers and brands who are going to join the content arms race. CMI’s 2014 study cited 93% of B2B marketers and 90% of B2C marketers are doing some form of content marketing. But what’s interesting to me is when I asked inbound.org what their biggest content promotion challenge was, they listed “time and resource” as their top challenge. Nothing else even came close.
The problem is most marketers are not doing content marketing, they are doing content, and scaling the hell out of it, but they are not allowing for time to market that content. In some industries just doing content may be enough, if your competitors aren’t really in the content game, you can start to pick up a bunch of traffic from Google. In competitive industries this strategy would leave you dead in the water.
It’s for the reasons above that I presented on the “Art & Science of Content Promotion” at #INBOUND14. I really enjoyed giving this session on why you should really consider your overall content promotion framework and spend as much time on promotion for your content as you would do on production of it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kieran Flanagan
VP, Marketing at Hubspot
Kieran Flanagan has a proven track record in helping SaaS businesses, from start-ups to enterprise-level grow their traffic, users and revenue. He is a thought leader on growth marketing and speaks at events across the globe on the topic. For more frequent updates follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.