By Jorgen Sundberg
Originally published on Business 2 Community.
Content marketing – ever heard of it? Apparently it’s something to do with creating valuable pieces of content to draw in potential customers to your products or services. OK, you do know it and chances are you’re doing it already.
LinkedIn have created something called “Why we’re hungry for remarkable content” – together with Altimeter Group.
On average, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, and generates three times as many leads according to LinkedIn. B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not blog.
The challenge with content marketing and content in general is that there is a lot of it going out in the ether. 10 years ago, people were excited to read a blog post whereas today they are bombarded with status updates, videos, slide decks, webinars and podcasts.
Did you know that 4.6 billion pieces of content are produced daily? At the same time our attention spans are down to 8 seconds and falling, I know I can’t watch more than a few seconds of a YouTube video before I switch off.
So we’re struggling to pay attention for longer periods at the time but on average we check our phones 110 times per day and as employees, we check email 30 times every hour. This indicates we’re still thirsty for content but we keep checking for something that will blow us away.
What’s the implication for marketers? You have to create remarkable content.
As Steve Rayson of Buzzsumo said on this podcast, the difference between the best content on something and the 2nd/3rd best piece is vast. The best piece gets way, way more shares and backlinks and ends up being the go-to piece whereas the others serve as comparisons for people who have time to click and browse.
Mitch Joel of Mirum also has another interesting take on this, he argues that there are plenty of high-quality pieces of content going out on places like Forbes, Medium or Harvard Business Review and just being great isn’t enough to cut through the noise. You also have to have a distribution strategy, involving your network across your blog, email, social and any other channels. And you will have to be prepared to advertise to get seen – something marketers should be comfortable with if they have taken time and effort to create remarkable content – you’ll want this to be seen.
So that’s my tip of the week and for the year of 2016: Focus on creating remarkable content, make sure it’s the best piece out there on a particular topic and have a clear distribution strategy.
This post is adapted from this week’s Social Media Know-How podcast.