It’s no secret that content marketing has been all of the rage the last couple of years. Adoption rates, as reported by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), bear this out, too. That might lead many to believe that last year’s top digital marketing focus might have been content marketing.
That’s great, but there’s a little problem with that. CMI reports that only 37 percent of marketers believe their content is effective.
Since so many brands in a variety of industries are cranking out content, many of these verticals have moved from content deficits to surpluses in the last few years. There’s much more competition for online content consumers’ attention today than at any other time in history.
Early adopter brands are the ones mostly reaping the content marketing rewards. They earned their audiences when they were one of the only content producing brands in their industry.
Related Class: The Marketer's Secret to Content Marketing Success
In the time of content deficits, brands could mostly rely on organic social and search channels to deliver the audiences they sought. That dynamic has changed substantially in the last few years. Year over year growth in organic search queries is on the decline and Facebook’s organic visibility is quickly approaching zero.
Twitter announced last fall that it will be minimizing brands’ organic visibility, too. SEO isn’t what it used to be, either.
Today, it’s easier to earn a real audience that produces the signals Google and the other search engines use to determine relevance than it is to game their algorithms.
As a result, brands should focus on marketing their content using earned and paid channels, and not content marketing this year. Creating owned media, hitting the publish button, sharing it on social media and broadcasting to a small email list won’t cut it in 2015.
Marketers residing in the 63 percent that believe their content is ineffective are starting to figure this out. The ones that don’t will start to see company support for content marketing wane.
The Channels of Content Promotion
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It’s not a mystery why over the last several years a cornucopia of new and unique content promotion tools, networks and tactics have cropped up. The promise of search and social organically delivering game changing business results in a "build and they will come" strategy is a myth with today’s content surpluses.
That’s why a robust content promotion ecosystem that leverages both paid and earned media for a converged strategy exists.
Related Class: Creating Content that Converts for Lead Generation
Each earned and paid tactic represented in the channels above aren’t necessarily game changers by themselves. Leveraging a mix of tactics increases the likelihood of success.
For a more detailed and thorough explanation of the strategies, tactics and tools of content promotion download my latest ebook, The Content Promotion Manifesto for free, but only for a limited time.