The Big Content Marketing Shift 2015
For the past couple of years, when we refer to content marketing, the first thing that comes to mind is blogging. The benefits of blogging is numerous. Besides engaging audiences, blogging helps a lot with SEO. By adding new blog posts to your website, you are essentially adding more content and web pages to feed search engines. The more information search engines gather about your website and services, the better they can rank you for matching search terms.
Then why is it that this article is titled: The Big Content Marketing Shift 2015? Will blogging slowing lose importance? Absolutely not. Blogging will be around for many decades to come. But what we are seeing in 2015 is an increased focus in 2 other content marketing channels: specifically Social Media and Email Marketing. Blogging today is literally a given. If you are a content marketer, then you blog and you recommend others to blog. Blogging is so effective that it has today become mandatory to have.
Then if everyone is blogging, how do you stand out of the crowd? How do you capture more audience than your competitors who are probably already blogging as well? Content marketing is a very large discipline and the channels to distribute your content is immense. This is why Email Marketing is making a huge come back and Social Media has taken the spotlight. These charts from the Content Marketing Institute, suggest that it’s only a matter of time before this same strategy focus propagates to all content marketers worldwide.
For B2B, Social Media comes first followed by eNewsletters (Email Marketing). For a quick introduction to Email Marketing, see our Email Marketing Infographic here.
For B2C, as you can see that the trends are similar to B2B with Social Media first followed closely by eNewsletters.
What does this mean for brands? First and foremost, before you decide on moving your marketing budget around, you might want to get a full understanding of what Social Media and Email Marketing strategies work for you.
Contrary to most beliefs, Email Marketing is more than just simply blasting out emails. It’s not about having someone send out standard corporate newsletters but requires an extensive strategy to both acquire new leads and reactivate sleeping subscribers. It is in fact a very sophisticated and powerful retention strategy if done right.
Email Marketing isn’t a 1-man’s job. In retrospect, for a single campaign, you would need a copywriter, a designer, coders, database specialists to segment your user list and of course a seasoned online marketer who knows the gimmicks of emails such as how to avoid having your emails end up in your recipients’ junk folder.
Similar to Email Marketing, Social Media requires a full team. Besides having a social media manager to mange the channel, you would need a copywriter, a graphic designer and a technical person to help with creating apps, at the very least.
While the world-over has embraced Social Media channels as part of their marketing plan, it is only a matter of time before Email Marketing gains the same importance in Asia.
If you want to learn more about the mechanics of Email and Social Media Marketing, you can also talk to one of our experts here.
Image Credit: sparksheet.com
