Creating impactful website blogs, producing how-to videos, and utilizing sharp images to demonstrate a brand’s purpose and promise is a content strategy that can elevate a brand’s authority in the field, promote increased customer interactions, and foster a better understanding of the needs of the audience. Content marketing is revolutionizing the way brands connect with customers through two-way conversations in social media channels. Every day, more than 4.2 billion people are active across multiple social media platforms, each spending an average of 2 hours and 25 minutes looking for solutions. “Worldwide content marketing spend set to grow to $487 billion by 2026, driven by the shift toward personalized, optimized, and targeted experiences.” With such a high demand for information, maintaining an efficient supply chain for new and impactful content is becoming a daunting challenge for marketing professionals.
A Content supply chain encompasses planning, creating, and recording an inventory of personalized marketing content that is delivered to a finely segmented audience at the right time and through the correct channel to effectively capture the interest of potential consumers. Managing and researching the content supply can be cumbersome and can consume up to 85 percent of a marketing professional’s time. While the digital marketing environment is a very effective way to make connections with potential customers, generating a steady and consistent flow of content from internal sources is becoming expensive and very challenging. So, how can the digital content marketing supply chain be designed to keep a brand from being lost in an avalanche of competitive noise?
Customer-created content can often ease the burden of brand-created messaging. Many current and loyal customers are actively championing favorite brands across multiple digital channels. Studies reveal that consumers prefer content that is generated by brand influencers rather than from the brand or popular celebrities. Many marketers are failing to adequately harvest content from less traditional content-created sources. “I think that needs to change,” says the CEO at Bazaarvoice, the leading provider of product reviews and user-generated content (UGC) solutions. “The way content is created, managed and distributed, as well as the technology used to do all those things, needs to all be connected—that’s a core part of the content supply chain.”
As with all things marketing, the first step in creating a content supply chain is defining and developing a clear and concise strategy. Establish specific and reasonable business objectives, identify specific audiences to target, and put in place metrics to measure the effectiveness of the process. Metrics are sets of data that monitor a brand’s campaigns and consumer conversations to determine how effective the messaging and channels perform. Creating content that can be used across multiple channels can increase the consistency of the message and save valuable development time and expense.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing is trending rapidly as brands attempt to control marketing costs by leveraging machine learning to make automated decisions. Using AI, companies can boost the return on investment (ROI) of marketing campaigns through predictive modeling, advanced segmentation, and even personalization. To personally engage large segments of consumers on an economic scale, AI and machine learning are critical to implementing and measuring successful marketing campaigns and are accelerating the analysis and interpretation of data at a speed and volume beyond human capabilities.
Generating personalized marketing content has always been thought to be a creative function that was the purview of human capacity, but today numerous brands are experimenting with employing algorithmic-based artificial intelligence that mimics human-generated creative content. However, the challenge of developing complete trust in AI remains elusive to many brands because algorithms are wholly dependent on imputed data to generate a result.
In order to meet the challenge of creating an ever increasing supply of constant, more and more small- to mid-size companies are discovering the benefits of contracting with outside marketing services firms to remain relevant in an ever more competitive marketplace. The rapid changes in digital communications can complicate managing social media and digital advertising and marketing campaigns. Spinning-off responsibility for managing content creation and maintaining an efficient and creditable content supply chain can be an effective route for companies of all sizes.
By leveraging technology, the experienced digital marketing team at Junction Creative Solutions (Junction) executes smart, purpose-driven digital marketing campaigns to drive qualified traffic and leads which ultimately lead to new business. For more information, call 678-686-1125 today.