What exactly is content marketing?
Content Marketing is owning, as opposed to renting, media. It’s a marketing process to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating content in order to change or enhance a consumer behavior.
Consumers are generally more positive about content marketing than they are about traditional advertising, although marketers overestimate consumers' preference, new research reveals.
Just 10 per cent of people said they had a positive attitude towards advertising from brands, according to findings from the content marketing agency Seven. But more than half (57 per cent) of those surveyed said they "definitely" or "tend to" agree that they feel more positive towards brands that produce content for them.
However, the research suggested senior marketers overestimated people’s preference for content. Seventy-seven per cent said they believed consumers prefer content to traditional advertising forms.
Robin Bonn, the business development director at Seven, said this overestimation of preference was due to "the general hype around content marketing" and brands moving to a "genuinely always-on" strategy from a campaign-based one.
What this means is, Content marketing isn't centered on a campaign, but a constant flow of engagement from a brand to its audience.
Clearly, these concepts are
generally good for marketers, but agencies of all disciplines need to work
harder to explain what we mean when we toss in these words like confetti.
On average, marketers said they
allocated 20.6 per cent of a brand’s budget to owned media, 28.8 per cent to
digital paid media and 50.6 per cent to traditional paid media.
Content marketing, in its many
guises, is emerging as one of the hot topics in advertising. Increasingly, the
gap between ‘owned’ and ‘paid for’ media is converging, fueled by both the rise
of social media and the restrictions of mobile as a channel.
It is now the best possible way of not only finding customers, but retaining them, making them brand ambassadors. We have come to realize that consumers have simply shut off the
traditional world of marketing. They now can own a DVR to skip television
advertising, often ignore magazine advertising, and now have become so adept at
online “surfing” that they can take in online information without a care for
banners or buttons (making them irrelevant). Smart marketers understand that traditional
marketing is becoming less and less effective by the minute, and that
there has to be a better way. Thought leaders and marketing experts
from around the world, including the likes of Seth Godin and
hundreds of the leading thinkers in marketing, have
concluded that content marketing isn’t just the future, it’s the present.
Some quick examples of excellent content marketing.
This is what we do at Creative Advertising Caribbean. Leading Caribbean brands towards a better way to connect with its audience. Make sure to check us out at www.cacaribbean.com
