Addressing Noise in Content Marketing

Before “the cloud” and “AI” were the hottest buzzwords, you would’ve heard a lot about Content Marketing and phrases like “Content is king”. Quality content still remains king and is more important now than ever but the game has certainly transformed and tightened.  

With the wider markets small and large now incorporating content strategies into their businesses and publishing frequently, we as a society find ourselves surrounded by “noise” – a coined term which really just means “information over-saturation”. Many content agencies are disconnected from the important information that resides in competitors’ content marketing.  When a business is disconnected from understanding the competitive “noise” in the market it often results in what I refer to as, “bloat content” – publishing for the sake of publishing. Unfortunately, it’s often left up to the business owner to understand and inform the content agency of competitors’ content marketing strategies however, for most business owners this isn’t practical. This disconnect is where content loses a lot of its value and lacks the engagement necessary to be useful to your customers.

Moreover, with the introduction of Influencer Marketing across social media platforms over the years, customers are not only being served “noise” from competitors and related industries but they’re also getting served paid content from influencers and aggregation platforms too in the form of guest posting and product highlights. These influencers and outlets don’t even necessarily have to be working in your industry, they merely need to have an actively engaged audience with a similar characteristics and interests as your customers. Influencer marketing is an extremely powerful and cost-effective marketing tool for reaching new audiences but business owners must be cautious in auditing and studying prospective influencers in order to prevent content from being buried in the Influencer’s, “noise” from other content. 

Creating quality content is certainly getting more and more difficult and top agencies in current efforts to penetrate the market are conducting very closely monitored analytics alongside A/B testing to better understand what the customer prefers, not whatever message the company feels that they need to post. This is commonly referred to as inbound marketing; where the customer decides every action and interaction on their terms and the business simply serves as an educational service/facility, later providing the customer with a seamless experience to purchasing their service/product once they’re ready to convert. Of course, even within the inbound marketing-sphere there’s a number of strategies that marketers employ to, “usher” customers along that discovery stage which I will cover in detail within an upcoming article. 

Having observed the transformation of content marketing over the years we are very mindful not to draw up a content marketing strategy that provides no value to customers, we research extensively to understand your customer, their interests, behaviours and other types of content that they engage with (including competitors and influencers). Inevitably, we must involve ourselves in the noise in order to reach the customers however, the louder you are (the more rich and valuable the content is) the better engagement and response we receive from the customer.