Brands are generally unsatisfied with in-house content

Brands that focus on in-house content creation are generally unsatisfied with the results and are struggling to identify and invest in content that could transform their business. These are findings from the recent Social Media Week in New York, where the latest trends were discussed in content marketing sessions.

The question of whether brands are spending too much on the wrong content is a hot topic for marketers in 2017 and Noah Brier, CEO of social media marketing enterprise Percolate, claimed that “everyone” is currently trying to determine just how much content is the right amount and how to balance this with budget constraints and the use of creative partners.

One theme that emerged is that brands are not overly enthusiastic about their output when publishing in-house content. This dovetails with recent reports, such as a study from B2B software services company Clutch, which showed that in-house content marketers are creating a wealth of blog posts, videos, infographics and original data but don’t consider the majority of it to be very effective.

This suggests that content agencies may be better equipped to meet the demands of today’s digital marketing landscape and help brands streamline, optimise and improve their content campaigns. They could also likely close the huge gulf between content usage and effectiveness.

“Brands publish a lot of content, up to ten times a day. But where does it come from? Is one person writing ten blog posts a day? It’s very hard, because a lot of the time, there’s only one person creating it,” Cara Friedman, Head of Social Media at fitness enterprise ClassPass, said.

Another major problem for brands is the disparity between the budgets allocated for content creation and distribution. According to Brier, only around ten per cent of brand investment is spent on high-quality content, while the remaining 90 per cent is set aside for marketing. He added that balancing these investments and ensuring that the right content is created could go a long way in improving digital marketing endeavours. The Social Media Week conference also touched on the growing importance of user-generated content and how it can be used to alleviate brands’ growing financial burden.