The numbers don’t lie. Traditional advertising, including online banners, print and broadcast, is becoming less effective by the minute. Business consumers know how to tune it out and have all the tools to avoid it. In your buyer’s eye, paid media is practically invisible.
So what is the alternative? First and foremost, it’s delivering content that the buyer wants and needs in order to address their challenges and understand your solution. This is the essence of today’s content marketing. It provides a steady stream of engaging content rather than traditional ads that may be intrusive and not relevant. The primary reason for this is that buyers have shown they are more apt to respond to content that addresses their pain that they opted in for versus the intrusiveness of content that is pushed on them touting a product or service they didn’t request.
Marketing allows marketers to develop a closer bond with buyers by delivering contextually relevant information that makes them more intelligent. In turn, buyers reward them with their business and loyalty. So that begs the question…isn’t it better to “own” the content rather than “rent” the real estate for traditional paid media?
There are dozens of brand studies that show content marketing generates upwards of two-and-a-half times the return on investment for every $1,000 invested in “owned” versus “rented” media. This finding makes sense based on the widely accepted assumption that most B2B buyers have already gone through 70% of their buying journey – having identified their challenge as well as potential solution providers – by the time they are ready to buy.
According to Ad Age’s BtoB Marketing Outlook Survey, 75.1 percent of B2B marketers will invest more in their content campaigns in 2014 than last year. Smart marketers are going to funnel more of their budget toward content creation, forcing them to make hard decisions about where to pull that money from. Advertising is set up to be the fall guy.
Marketers need to pay close attention to these changing dynamics. Advertising will always have a place in marketing budgets, but for the growing number of us that live and die by ROI, having an effective content marketing publishing and distribution strategy will be a top priority in 2015. What’s in your budget?