Experts predict that almost 66% of companies are investing in content marketing and this number is expected to rise. Brands that adopt content marketing early in their marketing strategy will quickly learn, iterate and reap rewards. As you move into 2017 and think about the future of your businesses, it’s time that you know and understand some trends impacting content marketing in India.
We have listed down three major trends so you can learn from your past, identify new trends, and make decisions about where to prioritize and de-prioritize.
Trend 1: Mapping Content Marketing with Buyer’s Journey
Content marketing can accomplish a wide range of objectives, and this is why it is increasingly becoming a mandatory part of marketing strategies. From acquisition to retention, content marketing is used for addressing opportunities across the buyer’s journey by Indian marketers. Mapping content marketing with buyer’s journey can be done in the following stages:
Buyer’s journey in content marketing process
The Discovery Stage
During the discovery stage of the buyer’s journey, the main goal of content marketing is to create awareness of a specific problem and then focuses it on aligning that problem with various issues that are related to the business. Common types of content used include editorial content, research reports, whitepapers, and statistical reports that support the pain points the buyer is experiencing.
The Consideration Stage
During the consideration stage, the main aim of content marketing is to help the buyer identify specific needs for solving the problem that was identified in the discovery stage. After identifying the solution, the organization aligns that solution with specific business needs which the individual buyer experiences.
The Decision Stage
In this stage, you have to convince your buyers to consider your solution as the one that will satisfy their pain point.
Thus, developing content that is appropriate for the situation is the one thing that sets an average content marketing strategy apart from an outstanding content marketing strategy.
Trend 2: Investing in Multi-Touch Attribution
The versatility of content marketing allows companies to meet objectives across the buyer’s journey. But, today marketers around the world are predominantly stuck to measuring success with lower-funnel metrics, like lead generation, even if their customer is in the upper stage of the funnel. You must focus on planning how you will measure results for your content marketing programs. Start by setting expectations and secure long-term investment from the company stakeholders. You can also make use of a multi-touch attribution model that records the entire progress of the customer from first-touch to last-touch and everything in between. After this, it attributes the value of that customer equally across every channel through which the customer came in contact. This model is effective because it uses a generic and oversimplified valuation of marketing channels.
Today content has become a buzzword for marketers. One big challenge that marketers and advertisers face is to get enough understanding of how to actually use content marketing to effectively convey their brand message. These trends can prove helpful for you, as they focus on giving importance to consumer journey and marketing channels. And, once you know where the customer is, it becomes easier for you to create stories that will engage consumers and still gets your brand message in a subtle and relevant manner.