My thesis for this article is that companies online are using content marketing in a very soft and inefficient way. New content is being uploaded every day in astonishing volumes, but to what purpose?
Do we publish content simply to be noticed, or to drive towards a specific outcome?
From where I sit, it appears that far too many companies fall within that first group, publishing content simply because it seems to be a smart thing to do. Or because their marketing advisors have told them they need to reach more eyeballs. Or to engage more with their audience. Or simply to “be there” or risk becoming invisible and irrelevant.
And, of course, the more everyone publishes, the greater the pressure to publish even more, or become lost in the noise.
How we got here, starting in early 2011…
Content marketing has been going through some turbulent times. I think we can all agree on that.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s pinpoint the opening of this period with the arrival of Google’s Panda algorithm update back in February of 2011. Panda penalized and continues to penalize thin content, content farms and sites with high ad-to-content ratios.
That marked the end of the glory days for everyone who flooded the web with low-quality content, and succeeded just by knowing SEO 101 and littering their pages with relevant keywords.
But as we know, the arrival of Panda 1.0 was just the beginning. Venice. Penguin. Phantom. And now a creature of a different stripe - Hummingbird. Not to mention the whole “Not Provided” issue.
With all this pressure on content creation, how come the content marketing world is still expanding so fast? How come all these algorithm updates and other changes at Google haven’t put the brakes on the number of new pages, posts and videos being uploaded?
Because of social media.
Social media feeds on content. It demands fresh content. If you don’t publish more and more content, you have nothing new to talk about or link to. And your followers and friends have nothing new to say about you.
This means a webmaster can reasonably say, “Truthfully, I no longer have any idea how to get on page one of the Google search results. But I do know we can get a bucket load of traffic by linking to our new content pages from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube and so on.”
Best of all, for the lazy content creator, there is no quality filter for social media. There are no tiresome algorithms to push you onto page two or lower. In fact, it’s often the case that the most trivial content on social media – burping babies, for example – earns the most eyeballs.
However, as companies turn to social media for more and more eyeballs, we are seeing a corresponding rise in soft-target content marketing.
What is soft-target content marketing?
Put simply, soft-target content marketing is when you are simply chasing the numbers.
You are measuring success according to the number of likes you have on Facebook, or the numbers of followers on Twitter. It’s when you measure success by the number of people reading the content on your website. “Our site traffic is up by 23% this quarter! High fives everyone!”
In very simple terms, this is what it looks like.
Yes, your social media numbers are climbing. Yes, your page views are increasing.
But I don’t recall ever seeing a line for these numbers on any company’s profit and loss statement.
If you have only soft targets, like “more eyeballs”, then it doesn’t matter how good your content is. Nor does it matter how tight and impressive your content calendar is. Or how smart your social media team is. You are working very, very hard for a result that is more or less meaningless.
No wonder so many companies are scratching their heads and failing to find the ROI of social media.
Of course, this soft-target approach works OK if you are a media company and have a site like CNN.com. Their business model is all about getting more eyeballs in front of the advertising on each of the site’s pages.
But if you are in the business of selling products or services, and use a website to either make or support those sales, then the soft-target approach isn’t going to help you much.
If it’s ROI you want, pay more attention to hard-target content marketing.
If you want to understand hard-target content marketing, all you have to do is cozy up to a direct response marketer and pick his or her brain.
Direct response marketers measure everything, test everything, and make sure that every minute they spend and dollar they spend points in the direction of increased sales.
They are also big fans of content marketing and always have been, even before the arrival of the web.
When a direct response marketer creates a schedule or calendar of content, it looks more like this.
As you can see, the direct marketer is just as devoted to the creation of content, in several forms and formats. But he or she doesn’t simple create content to make noise or drive links to various other properties.
This is hard-target content marketing because everything drives forward according to a plan, and culminates in the maximizing of sales.
The high-fives are not driven by an increase in their Klout score. They are driven by increased revenues.
Yes, this really is content marketing.
If you think that the content created by direct-response marketers is simply thinly-veiled sales material, you are wrong.
The process of moving prospects along the pipeline is very much aligned with best practices in both content marketing and social media.
Any smart content marketer will make sure they over-deliver on the quality of the content in a massive way. The more generous you are with the free content, the more likely your readers are to stick with you.
And with social media, the smart marketer will be truly social…participating in comments streams and so on. Why? Because it builds trust.
And in the example shown above, value + trust moves people towards the free webinar or teleconference call. And that maximizes the number of people likely to buy from the sales page.
Wrapping it up…
Direct response marketers are masters of hard-target content marketing.
And here’s a wake-up message for you: The web is a direct response medium, from top to bottom. If people don’t click on your links, you lose. Links to and from your social media updates. Links to and from your web content. Links to and from your sales pages. It’s all direct response. Success depends on driving your visitors to take immediate action, whatever that action might be.
That’s why, if you want to succeed, you need to revise your plans, update your content calendars, and upgrade to hard-target content marketing.
