In the beginning, there were products and services, and some
were good. Fewer became trusted brands, but those that did enjoyed unquestioned
loyalty supported by a simple yet effective marketing engines built to reach
people in mass quantity. The formula worked for decades. An empire was built on
the shoulders of Madison Avenue and expanded globally. It is an empire, which
still exists today, though arguably it’s a diminished version of its former self.
More recently, technology has had it’s own evolutionary process which it’s
still going through. Well over a decade ago, when large organizations developed
and updated their complex Web properties, the most popular and rigorous process
one could follow in development was referred to as “Waterfall”. Think of this as a descending, linear
staircase where one step of the process was completed in full before moving on
the next. The methodology was rigorous, but also left little room for tweaking,
testing, adapting and improving along the way.
Responsive Design
Today, digital design and development is often done
leveraging the “agile” method of development, which favors smaller, cyclical
bursts of development and rapid testing. Start-ups favor this approach as well
building not only their tech products but also their business models in a way,
which resembles more of an agile philosophy vs. a rigid, sequential approach.
Even “large” start-ups like Facebook demonstrate this in how they roll out
enhancements to their global platform, often making the changes incrementally,
rolling them out with select users and then adjusting based off the data they
analyze. Google often works this was as well. If you were to undertake designing and building a digital
property today—you would also have to ensure that it would perform across
multiple platforms (desktop, tablet, mobile). A popular methodology for
developing this way is called “responsive design”—a technique, which leverages
code that results in a shape shifting design which auto-magically fits the
medium it, is being interacted with in.
Most Marketing
Remains Linear And Unresponsive
Despite the pervasive nature of all manifestations of
digital, including social and mobile, much of the marketing emphasis remains
dedicated to reaching people in mass, following a tried and true formula for
advertising designed to build off consumer insights and craft compelling
messages which could be distributed across a myriad of channels (including
digital). The approach is designed for the broadcast industrial machine
including print, radio and television, which, despite rumors of its demise is
likely to stay with us for some time. The problem it poses however is that it
is an approach that much like its counterpart in tech development, (Waterfall)
is neither nimble nor flexible and isn’t built for rapid change nor does it
adapt well beyond the dominant media it was designed for.
“Content Marketing”
Is Disrupting Modern Day Brand Building
CMOs, chief digital officers and brand managers across many
organizations are currently grappling with the notion of content used in the
context of marketing—inherently they understand that their customers value
content, consume it, create it, and share it—and they want in on the action.
They also understand that this type of content isn’t often the traditional
campaigns they execute for broadcast so they face a dilemma:
What content do
consumers value most?
How do they find it?
What gets individuals
sharing content with peers?
How does content
scale, reaching the right audience at the right time?
How do brands insert
themselves into the content ecosystem in ways that bring value back to the
brand?
Responsive Marketing
The solution to the content question lies somewhere between acknowledging
that a brand must support both a traditional, linear marketing model in
addition to a newer, cyclical construct which is constantly in tune with the
current environment and operates in consolidated time frames. Responsive
marketing sits at the core of the content evolution that many companies find
themselves trying to navigate as they pull together newsrooms, command centers
and media operations which are designed to help brands act more like
publishers. All of these can be effective in treating the symptoms a brand may
exhibit if they possess only competencies in linear forms of marketing, but
they do not address the root issue—deconstructing a marketing machine which
places the majority of resources on mass marketing will ensure it never gains
proficiency in alternate forms of content and media.
A more holistic approach
is needed.
The Acquisition & Engagement Funnel
Marketing is by design measurable, and most marketers are trained to value
metrics, which can be at minimum tied to awareness and ideally connected to
sales and loyalty. This is where the relationship between responsive content
marketing and business objectives must be reconciled—what good is content if it
is not connected to commerce? Content should be a vehicle, which “fills the
marketing funnel” and should be leveraged as the currency, which entices the
target to share, thus creating further awareness for the brand, which can lead
to bringing others into the funnel. It is the consumption of content via
social, web and mobile which fuels the acquisition and engagement funnel—the
flow works as follows:
Shared And Found
Content Drives Acquisition
Content which is optimized and valuable inevitably finds its target,
whether through paid, owned, earned or shared means (usually it’s a combination
of all). When content is found valuable, it often leads to an “acquisition”
whether it via e-mail or a subscription to a brand’s social property. The
“consumer” in this construct demonstrates intent to at minimum engage with the
brand.
Acquisition Drives
Engagement
Once a consumer, customer or prospect is acquired, a brand can further
engage via content, messages, and through “micro-interactions” over time. Each
like, comment, or share on Facebook for example is a micro-interaction, which
solidifies the relationship and loyalty between the brand and the consumer.
Loyalty Creates
Awareness
Customers “acquired” via social and digital means are now available for
targeted content marketing tactics which can be especially effective via paid
enhancements whether that be through social or search. In the case of
social—shared content leads to further awareness using the networks of peers as
a distribution ecosystem while organically raising its profile in organic
search results.
Content As Currency:
The Four Key Archetypes
For content to be successfully leveraged at the open end of
the marketing funnel, brands must understand the full landscape of content types
and the relationships they have with their core paid, earned and owned
channels. The four archetypes are:
Curated:
A brand can curate content from infinite digital sources and provide value
by deriving signal from noise. A popular tactic connected to curating is
aggregating it in a single destination for easy access.
Co-created:
Content can be co-created amongst consumers via collaboration or through
the consumer and the brand itself. Brands, which encourage consumers to
co-create content with it, invite them to participate but cannot often control
how consumers will want to co-create.
Original:
Original content is produced by the brand, specifically for its target
audience and is owned by the brand. Original content can take many forms and
production value and be planned in advance or spontaneously in response to
emerging trends and events.
Consumer generated:
Consumer or user generated content is often produced by non-professionals
and May or may not include references to the brand. It’s often in highest
quantity but also lowest quality.
Building &
Maintaining A Responsive Content Marketing Machine
In order to build a content machine for a brand or business, the leadership
behind it must buy into the premise that content is a viable brand building
tool. This sets the stage for an evolution of roles within the
organization—brand managers must at minimum be literate in community
management, editorial and digital analytics. Organizations internally should
re-evaluate their digital centers of excellence and take stock of partners to
ensure that content strategy and execution exists as part of the mix. This
foundational work is core to then constructing a an “always ready” content
machine, which operates in a continual, cyclical fashion as part marketing,
part editorial operation as illustrated above.
Conclusion: Marketers Must Evolve Beyond The Linear
Unlike software or web development, marketers have had less pressure to
overhaul their approach despite signs that media consumption is highly
fragmented, shifting to digital and increasingly more difficult to track. As
more pressure is applied to the CMO to produce results for the organization; it
is more than tempting to rely on the mass metrics of the past to demonstrate
that reach is being achieved at scale. This undermines the need for marketing
to undergo it’s own transformation where shifts in resources go into building
up direct media channels (social or owned media) and potentially reaching more targeted
audiences who may be inclined to share a brand’s content with their peer
networks. An agile and adaptive mentality is badly needed in the marketing arm
of organizations—one that is less dependent on historical data to make
decisions and is inclined to parse data inputs as they come in daily.
The
content conundrum represent the tip of the iceberg for the marketing discipline
but must be dealt with as proof mounts that content is valued while overt
advertising and marketing is something to be filtered out. Brands will learn to
be more flexible, in tune with rapidly changing sentiment and responsive in
their approach to messaging engagement and telling their stories across a
de-centralized and splintered media landscape.
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