There’s been perhaps only one constant in the age of digital marketing: a constant state of evolution. To understand what’s happening in the current digital phase, it’s important to understand what happened in the last, an era largely thought of as the web phase.
Before, say, 2010, there was an era in which websites, banner ads, and microsites ruled the digital landscape and emerging social sites focused on setting up connections between people. But with the proliferation of mobile internet devices, a new era began, and what proliferation! The adoption rate of mobile touch-screen devices is 10 times that of the adoption rate of personal computers back in the 1980's. The emergence of mobile internet devices forced radical simplification. It took away Flash, it made banner ads less effective, it allowed users to slice and dice content as needed, and it accelerated social media as a primary communication platform.
Today, consumers gather content across a wide variety of devices and channels; the media is virtually under their control and information is captured on their terms. Change is necessary. On a broad level, content marketing is a friendly way to be part of a conversation and add value to what your audience cares about. More specifically, content marketing requires that you provide relevant information when and where your customer is looking for it. And it doesn’t always have to be directly related to your brand, but it does always have to add value to the customer’s experience. Good content marketing also gives your customer an avenue to act on it and a pathway to share it.
The digital evolution has also fostered an era of big data—data you likely already have or can easily access. Dive into the data and find out what your customer values most. Create content that is consistent with not only your brand but also those values, not to mention your customer’s interests, passions, and curiosities. That combination makes for long-term message relevance that will eventually fuel your brand. Be the expert—the advocate—your customer is looking for. Earn the love and facilitate the journey.
Finally, get to know the tools your customer is using to find content. For the month of March, the GLG blog is dedicated to the concept of content marketing. Through our words, infographics, videos, animations, and social posts, we’ll demonstrate some of the many tools of content marketing and how relevant messaging can be executed within each tool.
