Commentary

How Companies Can Optimize Their Content Marketing Efforts


In some ways, content marketing is as old as marketing itself. It’s basically storytelling. Stories that brands tell consumers about their products in any and all media available to reach as many consumers as they can. 

A panel session at OMMA’s Marketing Tech conference today, moderated by Alan Chapell, Principal, Chapell & Associates, featured a discussion among several agency executives about the myriad iterations of content marketing.

It covered what the term means to different constituencies, and how marketers try to put it at the core of what they do.

Traditional ad formats are a form of storytelling. But Tom Hespos,  Founder, Chief Media Officer, Underscore Marketing, opined that today’s broad array of media channels—digital and traditional—“allow you to put the whole story out there” in an unconstrained way.

Mark Egan Chief Client Officer, Maxus, said he believes content marketing is pretty much any form of communication that “brings to life” a brand’s central idea or values. That said, Egan added that having a strategy and goals is critical. Testing “shiny objects” is fine, but shouldn’t be the engine that drives a marketer’s content efforts.

Marketers, added Egan, need to think about content as an ecosystem. “Collaboration, efficiency and flexibility are key traits that need to be driven through the organization,” he said.

Data is a key component to developing meaningful content. Making sense of it and putting it to optimal use is still a work in progress, the panelists agreed. Part of the problem is that media giants like Facebook and Google don’t necessarily like to share data in ways that marketers can apply it universally.

“Aggregate learnings are limited,” said Craig Elimeliah, director of creative technology (North America) at VML, which is part of WPP.

Also, the media companies have a tendency to tell clients and agencies what they want to tell them with regard to data. “Don’t be told,” said Elimeliah. “Knock down doors,” he added, to get the Facebooks and Googles of the world to provide you with the data you need to derive insights to create content that truly benefit clients.

That’s easier said than done, but forging relationships helps, said Elimeliah. And if you’re part of a holding company that spends hundreds of millions with a media company, it can’t hurt to play that card.  

For more on what the panelists had to say, see the replay here

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