A recent study found that 75 percent of online content from brands gains zero marketing traction—and yet the resources being invested in such content are tremendous. It’s estimated that 7.5 million blog posts are published every day, with an average of 4-6 hours being put into the creation of each one. That’s 32.5 lifetimes being wasted every single day on content that’s not getting seen.
Marketers are often energized and inspired by the creative brainstorming that fuels powerful content marketing—but all of that energy and inspiration means nothing if it just ends up sitting on your own site. In order to run an efficient content plan, marketers need to put the same amount of effort into their distribution plans that they do into the creation of their content.
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Why Brand Content Fails to Gain Traction
A lot of content marketing assets today are built on a faulty assumption of “if we build it, they will come.” In other words, marketers spend endless effort crafting and placing compelling informational, educational, and entertaining content on their websites and other owned properties, in hopes that customers and prospects will find the content there and be inspired to conversion.
Unfortunately, the digital ecosystem doesn’t work that way anymore, if it ever did. The proliferation of online content, both professional and user-generated, means that very little brand content consumption today happens on brand properties. Rather, it happens within social media channels, in forums, on reputable publisher sites, via video platforms—you name it. Yes, people are researching a brand’s product category and often even the brand itself—but they’re not doing so on brand properties.
So, why is that where marketers are storing their most valuable content assets?
Building a Strong Distribution Plan
Rather than creating content assets with a brand’s owned properties as the default destination, today’s content planning needs to walk hand in hand with distribution planning. It’s important for these processes to happen concurrently, as the intended destination for a piece of content will influence its format and presentation.
A brand wouldn’t, for example, want to produce a 15-minute product demo video and then look to retrofit it as a TikTok ad. Content placed within external channels should feel native to the destination and add value to the user experience, versus interrupting it.
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Budgeting for distribution alongside content creation represents a mindset shift for many marketing teams. When getting started with this process, it can help to stop thinking about content marketing separately from advertising. Rather, content marketing serves as the vital fuel for a company’s mid-funnel advertising strategy.
Ultimately, the bridge between awareness and action is paved with content, and marketers must look for opportunities to drive consideration by activating their content within mid-funnel advertising opportunities, including native ads. They simply can’t afford to pour resources into the creation of content that then languishes on a brand’s owned properties. A strong and efficient distribution plan that gets your content seen and shared is key to breaking through in today’s hyper-competitive digital landscape.
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