By Chris Lee

When it comes to any search marketing campaign or online customer relationship building exercise quality content is absolutely key. This is because search engines respect sites that publish new content regularly and also because consumers and business purchasing decision makers need informative, engaging content in the sales process to help them build trust in a particular service provider or brand.

According to a report out this winter 78 per cent of organisations consider content marketing to be important to their company but less than half (49 per cent) have actually put together a formal content marketing strategy.

The company behind the research, media software firm Meltwater, said that many companies are “learning on the job” how best to create and distribute content and effectively communicate with audiences.

Finding contentment

Meltwater’s research interviewed 450 companies with a staff of more than 250 across the world and found that 35 per cent had seen their social media budgets rise in the last 12 months. Social media’s importance is rising up the strategic communications agenda, with just over half seeing it as integral to their marketing efforts and as an opportunity rather than a threat. At the moment, social media features below other tried and tested marketing channels, Meltwater found.

According to the research, companies’ enthusiasm to embrace the changing nature of content marketing is tempered by the challenge of how to unlock its potential and produce sustainable, measurable success. The three most popular marketing channels are e-newsletters (62 per cent), print magazines (61 per cent) and social media (49 per cent).  However, in terms of engagement effectiveness, in-person events (61 per cent) and print magazines (56 per cent) score highest, with social media much lower (37 per cent). 

At a corporate level, the social networks that companies are most likely to use include Facebook (68 per cent), followed by Twitter (55 per cent), LinkedIn (43 per cent) and YouTube (42 per cent).

Growing pains

As companies become more accustomed to using social media for corporate purposes, they begin to experience “growing pains” and various competency gaps are exposed, Meltwater warned.  The biggest content marketing challenges are producing interesting (23 per cent) and new or different (21 per cent) content.  Furthermore, after a lack of resource and/or time (38 per cent) to invest in social media, the most significant challenges relate to an inability to measure social media’s impact on goals (30 per cent) and a lack of adequate monitoring (27 per cent).  Just over half think it is difficult to measure the true return on investment of social media activities, with only one in six companies fully satisfied that they can properly measure return on investment.

“Interestingly, the challenges that marketing departments are faced with are not about cost.  It’s about understanding how social media works, increasing their competency in delivering coherent strategies, and measuring their impact,” said Jorn Lyseggen, CEO, Meltwater Group. “The industry is in a transitional period and still very much in its infancy.  With transition comes risk, and more emphasis will therefore be placed on measuring effectiveness to help justify the investment.  Knowing who is saying what and where about your brand is a key part of measuring changes in sentiment and therefore the impact of online activities.”

You can download the full Meltwater Group report Future of Content here.