As content marketing continues to become increasingly prevalent for brands and companies across all industries, leaders will need to find new ways to stand out in the crowded content marketing space.
And while many marketing departments are finding effective strategies through trial and error, recent research from Captora may hold the key to unlocking content marketing success. The research, published in an infographic on Mashable.com, revealed that 80 percent of decision makers prefer custom content to advertising. Furthermore, the study found that 61 percent of consumers are more likely to spend money at a company that provides custom content.
In short, custom content as it relates to content marketing is any content that is created specifically for your target audience’s industry concerns or interests . This content is created with the primary purpose of informing, educating or helping your audience understand, learn or accomplish something new, with a secondary purpose of increasing lead generation.
Here are three reasons why content marketers are struggling to create the valuable content that helps their brands stand out from their competitors:
1.There’s too much content out there: According to most experts’ estimates, only a little more than one-third of the entire world’s population is connected to the Internet. With that being said, those who are connected create an unfathomable amount of content. It’s hard to calculate the exact amount of data stored on the Internet’s servers (although we know there’s enough data to have it measured in petabytes) but to put it in perspective, there are more than 2 million blogs posted each day. The numbers are even more astounding if we look at video, where more than a year’s worth of content (more than 850,000 hours, in fact) is uploaded to YouTube each day. With this much content at the consumers disposal, consumers can now pick and choose what content they consume and when. Therefore, it’s more important than ever that your content stands out amongst the crowd.
2.Content marketers are running out of steam: Marketing departments that don’t outsource their content marketing needs and attempt to complete the workload on their own are bound to hit some speed bumps. We saw this last year when marketers spent more than $135 billion on content creation, but those budget dollars only produced quantity, not quality. In fact, research from Highspot revealed that 70 percent of content created by marketers isn’t being used because it’s simply not up to par. Marketers will need to focus on creating quality custom content, rather than churning out a high quantity of content that doesn’t satisfy their consumer’s desires.
3.Consumers want relatable content: Case in point, consumers are humans and they want to read or watch content that they can share a connection with, even if it is through the digital medium. The reason most consumers don’t trust advertisements—or flock to custom content over advertisements—is because custom content feels like it was made for the consumer by someone like the consumer. In fact, research has proven that 69 percent of consumers appreciate that custom content marketing targets their interests.
As the digital medium of the internet continues to mature and evolve, marketers will need to be more honest, thoughtful and considerate of consumer needs in their content creation. However, creating content of this caliber isn’t an easy task and the demand for great content can put a serious stress on your in-house team. If you’d like to learn how you can leverage your in-house experts and create the custom content that consumers prefer—without creating marketer burnout—click here.
