The vast majority of marketers say that their enterprises now believe that content is a vital business asset, but almost half admit that they don’t have a documented strategy in place for managing it effectively. These are the key findings from a new survey published by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI).
CMI polled the opinions of 411 marketers for its inaugural Content Management & Strategy Survey earlier this year. Overall, 92 per cent of respondents answered “Yes, somewhat” or “Yes, to a strong degree” when asked whether content is viewed as a business asset, which is generally defined as a process where there is ongoing investment and a desire to increase its value over time.
However, just 46 per cent said that they have created a content management strategy, and only nine per cent have adopted a holistic approach to producing, managing and distributing content. Scalability for content marketing is still a major challenge for marketers, and almost a quarter admit that they still “do things ad-hoc.”
“Most marketers are spending the majority of time creating and publishing content, but they aren’t managing that content throughout its lifecycle,” Content Marketing Institute Vice President of Content Michele Linn said this week. This suggests that marketers could benefit from working with a digital agency that can help them publish content in the right place and at the right time.
Marketers are also failing to put the necessary structures in place to manage their content efforts effectively. While 70 per cent now have style and brand guidelines, just a third have customer journey maps, and even less have structured content and a messaging framework.
Marketers are doing better in terms of the tools that they have at their disposal, as 76 per cent are using email marketing tech to manage content marketing efforts, and the majority have content management systems. However, almost half of those surveyed said that they still don’t know how to use these tools properly, which is exacerbating problems with weak strategies and content.
CMI concluded by urging marketers to streamline their workflow and tool sets to make content more effective so that it delivers better results and establish a foundation so that more sophisticated marketing techniques. such as artificial intelligence, can be implemented.
