Content marketing success isâ¦

Should we be judging content-led marketing in terms of financial ROI, or are views, likes and followers enough?

Over the past few years, content-led marketing has taken on a life of its own. The DMA has found that over two-thirds of marketers are producing more content than they were a year ago, and over half are planning to increase their content marketing spend in the next 12 months.
In an age where content is everywhere, saturating the web, the main question is why would your customer want to view what you’ve created? It has to sparkle, stand out and possibly even sing ... if it doesn’t, you probably shouldn’t bother.

Look at the leading lights of content production. Red Bull’s Stratos Dive is still a pinnacle of content creation, two years on. Another front-runner, Pepsi, has a plethora of videos with multi-millions of views. Take their free-running football or the human loop-the-loop as examples. But of course content doesn’t have to be in video format. There’s Buzzfeed, for example. It knows a thing or two about content – 100% of its revenue comes from it.
But what do they all have in common? Indeed, what does all shared and hyped content have in common?

They all evoke emotion.

They amaze the viewer, or they have that wow factor, or they make you laugh. They make you think: “I’ll share that”.

However, the more organisations spend, the more they’re going to want a way to gauge their ROI. Content can of course be ‘measured’ in terms of views, likes and followers, but actually calculating a return in terms of ROI proves to be rather elusive.

This makes it difficult to propose a content strategy to a board or senior colleagues. They might point to Dove as an example: its content strategy is extremely successful in that mentions, likes, views and columns inches are through the roof – but its profits are in decline.

So perhaps content marketing should be viewed through a long-term lens and not judged in terms of instant ROI. The aim of the game is to engage audiences in your brand and build relationships by engaging them in an ongoing conversation. What you want to see is your audience base grow, resulting in more follows, views, likes – and engagement.

Just make sure it’s worthy of their time.

Ben Peachell, Marketing Executive, Indicia

This is an edited version of a blog that first appeared on the Indicia website.