Content needs to provide immediate benefit to consumers to succeed

Brands and publishers need to ensure that their content is immersive and engaging and provides an immediate benefit to consumers in order to mitigate the impact of “content shock.” A new blog by digital market research enterprise Econsultancy has outlined four major steps that marketers should follow to optimise their content campaigns for increasingly time-starved consumers.

The need for consumer-centric content has recently been highlighted by several digital marketing experts, such as the Content Marketing Institute, and Econsultancy echoes these sentiments while adding that markets should aim to create videos, blog posts and news items that are relevant to how customers think, feel and act during each step of the content-consumption journey.

This desire to create value-added content endeavours also ties in neatly with the second goal of delivering online material that has a clear pay-off for consumers, whether it be a positive emotional response or a new discount or offer. Content should readily meet “social motivations of sharing” in some way so that readers and viewers feel compelled to send it to a friend due to a shared passion, a need for a product or a desire to start an online conversation.

Maximum exposure

Marketers also need to double down on more creative content, including video and VR, to ensure that their output is both “immersive and memorable.” While it is actually getting harder to connect with consumers due to a growing mass of content, people are now well versed in multi-tasking across media devices and are just as open to high-quality brand messages.

Finally, marketers should use in-depth analytics, data sources and digital tools to unearth insights and feedback that can transform their content marketing strategies. Software such as Spike, BuzzSumo and SocialBakers can all be used to determine the performance of content across a range of platforms and optimise campaigns to give them a better chance of performing well in the future.

A report published by Econsultancy and Adobe last week found that content marketing is now the most important digital activity for enterprises, so it is critical that organisations adopt new techniques and methods to attract attention, drive engagement, deliver their brand message and gain a competitive advantage in an increasingly saturated marketing landscape.