Content marketing is the new buzzword in the marketing world, and a study published in the trade magazine “Horizont” in early April has put it back in the spotlight. Some of the survey’s findings are surprising:
According to the study, the average content marketing budget currently stands at €126,000 a year and is set to keep rising. 43% of respondents plan to increase their content marketing budget over the next five years, and a further 50% might do so. In 64% of cases, the money needed will be new investment rather than coming from cuts to other budgets, such as PR. So content marketing will become even more important in the coming years, and spending on it will rise. This particular form of marketing is clearly the way forward. But what are the surprising findings?
The answer is simple: by a wide margin, 45% of respondents consider online advertising agencies to be the best-suited service providers for content marketing. Far behind the online agencies, in joint second and third place with 15% each, come traditional advertising agencies and PR agencies. Specialist corporate publishing houses only come fourth with 5%, and corporate publishing agencies trail in sixth with a meagre 2%. Equally surprising is that email newsletters (65%), the company’s own website (63%) and social media (55%) are seen as the most relevant content marketing channels. So measures that are accessible and distributed online are clearly ahead. Incidentally, last place in this category, with 27%, goes to the traditional printed customer magazine or newspaper, which is still handed out free in many shops today.
So much for the latest study. But what exactly is content marketing? And what do terms like owned media, earned media and paid media mean? Here are a few brief explanations.
Content marketing is the targeted placement of informative or advisory content. The aim is to get in touch with a very specific target audience, win them as customers for a company and keep them for the long term. Potential customers are not asked to buy directly. Instead, they are simply informed and won over to a particular company, brand or product. The “content”, in other words the informative message, can be distributed through various channels, such as your own website, social media platforms or blogs.
Depending on how it is published, distributed content can be divided into owned media, paid media and earned media. The owned media category covers all content that a company produces and distributes itself, for example on its own website, its own Facebook page or its own customer magazine. The second key element of content marketing is paid media. This is paid advertising, for example in the form of commercials or print ads, to name just two examples. Owned media and paid media are distributed and managed by the company in a targeted way, so they are easy to control. Earned media is a different story. Earned media is content generated by customers, for example when they rate, recommend or criticise a particular product. Possible platforms include blogs and review sites such as ciao.de or dooyoo.de. Earned media costs a company nothing, but unlike managed owned and paid media, it can be positive or negative, so it needs targeted monitoring.
In the digital age, the internet is becoming ever more important for distributing corporate content, because it allows content to be placed with particular precision for specific target audiences. That in turn makes content marketing especially cost-effective, and therefore so attractive to companies. All in all, it is hardly surprising that the survey mentioned above sees online agencies as more important and better suited to content marketing than corporate publishers.
So what does the survey mean for adisfaction in concrete terms?
Ideally, the know-how of online agencies on the one hand and corporate publishers on the other comes together to form a symbiosis that benefits both sides. A look at adisfaction’s work shows that, for years now, there have been no rigid boundaries between the areas the study rates so differently, and that our agency uses both disciplines to mutual benefit. adisfaction’s range of services extends from consulting and creative to search engine marketing and optimisation, social media marketing and online monitoring.
In our day-to-day work, it is particularly important to us to strike a good balance between media on the one hand and content marketing on the other. Content marketing, meaning the client’s content, produced by them or by us, is placed where it is relevant to the intended readership and where it reaches readers who may not yet know the client’s brand and products. Examples include the “News im Fokus” articles of our clients HSBC Trinkaus, ING Markets, RBS and Vontobel on onvista.de, or the “Input” news articles on handelsblatt.com. These targeted news placements are very successful and generate several thousand clicks a month. This shows that targeted placements on relevant websites bring readers and attention. They also inform customers and potential new customers, and so strengthen a company’s online presence.
To sum up: even though content marketing has only recently become a recurring topic of discussion, and the role of the internet in content marketing is being emphasised more and more, the principle of placing your own content on the internet in a targeted way is not new. It is exactly what adisfaction has been doing successfully for its clients for many years. With us, the work of a classic online agency and the work of a corporate publisher come together, which is why the study published in “Horizont” confirms what we have been doing for years.
