Deploying right content for marketing channels

Content marketing is not a Facebook status update or a random good morning tweet for brands. Evolving with social media and understanding how the digital community responds, brands have adapted to newer and effective content marketing trends.

Rather than a hard-selling advertisement, customers feel a lot more comfortable reading about a brand and making their choice of purchase.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 91 per cent of brands use content marketing to promote their business. 87 per cent of them use social media to distribute their content. As a mix of content, 77 per cent of the brands have taken blogs seriously and pushed content through that medium.

Brands have invested in research and development, created qualitative content, and distributed them via ebooks. Every brand according to its business has a primary channel of content distribution.

According to the research, 83 per cent distribute content via Linkedin, 80 per cent via Twitter, 80 per cent via Facebook and 39 per cent via Google+.

Creating exclusive content for the digital space has become increasingly important. No longer do brands, who take social media seriously, want to take images from Google and post it on their feeds. 54 per cent of the brands plan to increase spending on content marketing. This means creating exclusive content in the form of whitepapers, photographs and video content.

Many brands have started understanding why they have to be present on certain social media channels, and why some don’t matter to the brand. The same content might not fit all channels, and it is important to customise the content for each channel.

Content marketing is a technique of creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract, acquire and engage the target audience. According to Roper Public Affairs, 60 per cent say that brands content information helps customers make better product decisions.

Brands in the Middle East have a severe lack of Arabic content. As much as we know a huge part of the target audience is the Arabic-speaking population, we still do not invest time and resources in creating qualitative Arabic content. However, a gradual shift is happening.

— The writer is the director of McCollins Media.