Last year, the Content Marketing Institute announced they had sold to UBM, a large B2B event planner. If you were Joe Pulizzi (CMI’s owner) why would you sell? After all, CMI had been touting the huge growth of content marketing for years – never more so than in the previous 2 years leading up to their sale. It was clear to me that Joe recognized that content marketing had reached its zenith in adoption and definitely in hype.
We had been tracking the hype in content marketing for over three years. CMI’s yearly report seemed entirely too rosy for us.
An infographic from MarktingProfs and The Content Marketing Institute had several breathless predictions. These two statistics, in close proximity, caught my eye:
of B2B marketers will increase their content budgets next year
say they successfully achieve ROI from content marketing
So why are the 34% who aren’t getting ROI planning to spend more on content marketing next year? There is only one answer: Content marketing is over-hyped.
When I read this, my alarm bells went off and I began to plot our next move. That move is Trouble Group.
Why content marketing still matters
Content marketing is a great marketing tool for every size company from enterprise to small businesses. It’s useful for bringing in a small trickle of new customers, keeping them engaged, and nurturing them into spending money on your product or service. But blogs, emails, videos, SEO and every other part of the multi-headed beast that makes up “content marketing” are becoming a checklist nightmare rather than a showcase for creativity.
Our problem with content marketing alone is that it now gets you equal with your competitors, rather than ahead of them. So many other companies in your category are also offering e-books and white papers to pull you into their marketing funnel.
Why it’s time for more than content marketing
Front and center on our home page is the sentence, “Marketing has swung so far towards the metrics, it’s losing its creative soul.”
Even if you’re in a niche B2B category where no one else is doing content marketing, your prospects are still inundated with offers for free e-books, sponsored content on Linkedin, tweets, etc. So your content has to work that much harder to get on their radar.
We’re all for content marketing, but to stand out we’re now offering our clients a much more aggressive approach. As you can see from the samples on our website, it’s working.
Let’s discuss how to unleash Trouble Group ideas as a part of your marketing approach.