Now more than ever, building deep relationships with customers must be the focus of corporate communications. Many companies are aware of this, and most see content marketing as the means to make the customer an equal and more than just a transactional partner.
In the following article, we have analyzed and summarized 3 content marketing misconceptions for you. Or use the free PDF download for even more Xinsights:
1) Content Marketing - A new topic?
The theme Content Marketing is not as new as it is often presented in theory and practice. It is just that the approaches required today differ massively from those of 100 years ago. The main reasons for this are the increasing independence of the customer from the information offered by the provider and the growing number of channelsin which the consumer spends his time.
2) Content Marketing - A marketing discipline?
Nowadays, companies need to be flexible and act on the basis of a strategy that takes all these effects into account. This is where the second big mistake is made. Content marketing is seen as a discipline that is already practiced and does not require any knowledge beyond day-to-day business. This may be true to the extent that content know-how is generally available. However, our research has shown that it is not so easy for many companies to orchestrate this topic across channels and to implement the often existing strategic view.
In particular, the aforementioned consistency of the customer approach across different touchpoints is a major challenge. Long-established corporate structures make it very difficult to "retroactively" switch to a communication approach that affects many areas of a company.
3) Content Marketing - Without a content management system?
In order to implement content marketing in a way that is more market-driven than internal resource-driven and leads directly to pre-defined processes, the use of centralized content marketing software is recommended..
In addition to networked collaboration, software that covers the content marketing process holistically can also make the topic measurable. This makes it easy to see which content is relevant to the target audience and where future economic opportunities in content marketing lie for the company. Holistic software solutions are very diverse, but most support all parts of the content marketing process, which is why every company that does content marketing should look into appropriate software.
With the right software, content marketing can be scaled internationally. Many processes that can currently be operated and controlled manually at the national level can only be operated manually at the international level with additional effort, which often leads to scaling costs. Due to the resulting increasingly complex overall processes for content coordination, the costs also scale exponentially. However, these very processes can often be automated in such a way that reuse effects significantly increase the effectiveness and efficiency of content marketing.
Successful strategic content marketing consists of many interlocking processesthat must be implemented in existing (content marketing) structures. To ensure a successful transition from operational content marketing to long-term strategic content marketing, the first step should be an objective assessment of the company's current processes and structures. This should always be done against the backdrop of the specific industry, business goals and target audiences, so that the right focus can be placed in this complex area when creating the target processes and selecting the software.
This is the only way to avoid the mistakes that were made in content management more than a decade ago.
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