Last month, Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs released selected findings from their 15th annual content marketing survey. This survey was conducted between June 25 and August 16, 2024, and generated 980 responses from B2B marketers located (mostly) in North America.
The annual CMI/MarketingProfs survey has been one of my go-to resources for more than a decade. As with earlier editions of the research, the latest survey provides valuable insights regarding how B2B companies are doing content marketing and what practices are critical to success.
I’ve been a long-time advocate of content marketing. I’ve published over 200 posts about content marketing since I launched this blog in 2010. Over my 20-year career in marketing, I’ve watched content marketing evolve from a niche marketing technique to a core component of marketing at most B2B and B2C companies.
Given its widespread adoption and proven strengths, it might seem odd to suggest that the time has come for marketers to think differently about content marketing. But a change is needed and, in fact, is overdue.
I’m not suggesting that content-focused marketing is no longer effective, but I am arguing that it’s time to stop treating content marketing as a separate marketing discipline and start focusing on how to use the rich diversity of content to support marketing objectives that will drive strategic business outcomes.
A Quick Look at Content Marketing Evolution
The Gartner hype cycle was developed to track the maturity of emerging technologies, but it is also often used to describe the evolution of marketing techniques and practices. In this framework, a new marketing practice usually receives a huge amount of hype when it first appears, which leads to the spread of inflated expectations for the practice.
When a practice fails to meet these unreasonable expectations, many marketers become disillusioned with it, and some abandon it entirely. In time, however, some marketers develop more realistic expectations for the practice and begin to use it productively.
We also often see a second pattern in the evolution of marketing practices that runs alongside the Gartner hype cycle. When a new marketing practice begins to gain significant attention, a gaggle of “experts” soon appears to help companies adopt and use the practice.
These experts usually describe the practice as a new and distinct marketing discipline. Some argue that the new practice should replace other marketing methods and that the “old” rules of marketing no longer apply. Over time, however, astute marketers recognize that the fundamental objectives of marketing haven’t changed, and they begin to view the new practice as a tool for achieving those objectives.
This pattern is clearly evident in the evolution of content marketing. When its popularity and use began to grow, we quickly came to view content marketing as a distinct marketing discipline. Overall, this was good because it fostered the rapid development of a substantial body of knowledge about how to do content marketing effectively. The downside of this approach is that it made it easy to view content marketing as an end unto itself.
The essence of content marketing is using informative or entertaining content to, as CMI put it, “attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” Such content is the “fuel” for marketing programs that are designed to achieve a variety of marketing objectives.
Most strategic marketing objectives – such as revenue growth and increased market share – have remained largely unchanged for many years. Therefore, what we now call content marketing is about using a distinctive kind of content to achieve long-standing marketing goals.
Why the Different Way of Thinking Matters
Source: Pat Pilon via Flickr
Focusing on “content as a vehicle for achieving marketing objectives” rather than on “content marketing” may seem like an inconsequential difference, but it has meaningful implications. For one thing, it should inform how we approach marketing performance measurement.
Measuring the performance of content marketing programs has been a hot topic for several years, and numerous marketing pundits have offered measurement frameworks for this purpose. However, most companies should not focus on measuring the performance of content marketing per se.
In virtually all B2B companies, marketing will be responsible for three core types of marketing communication programs – brand building programs, demand generation programs, and customer retention programs. In some cases, marketing is also responsible for developing content for the company’s sales enablement program.
These programs are the mechanisms through which marketing achieves (or doesn’t achieve) its strategic objectives, and the performance of these programs is what companies should measure. Content is an essential element in all these programs, but it is only one of several factors that will determine program success.
Therefore, metrics that focus only on content performance won’t adequately measure program performance. A good marketing performance measurement system will include content-related metrics, but the primary metrics should be focused on the outcomes that each type of program is designed to produce and, ultimately, on the business impacts of those programs.
The Most Profound Marketing Practices Disappear
In a 1991 article for Scientific American, the late Mark Weiser, then the chief technology officer at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center wrote: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
Content marketing has been one of the most profound marketing developments of the past two decades. The development, management, and dissemination of content have become essential marketing competencies. Content marketing has been assimilated into the fabric of marketing and is simply the way marketing is now done.
Top image courtesy of The Wild Blogger via Flickr (CC).
