Frustrations with Ad Blockers and Content Marketing Share This Common Trait
Photo by Alex McCarthy on Unsplash
Recently, there was a flood of articles and opinion posts on how ad blockers signaled the end of digital advertising. Digital ads won’t go anywhere.
Around the same time, the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) released its annual B2B Content Marketing 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends - North America report. The report showed a decrease in how effective B2B marketers see content marketing. Because of this, many people are now writing drafts of their “content marketing is dead” posts. It’s not.
Underneath the statistics and flood of opinions are real signals showing us what to focus on in our 2016 digital marketing initiatives.
The Theme That Binds Us All
The main theme that topics like ad blockers and content marketing frustrations share is lazy marketing - marketing that suits our motives as marketers and not the interests or concerns of the audience or end user. This type of marketing is preventing our campaigns from performing as well as they could.
One of the reasons that ad blockers are scary for many marketers is because it’s the easy way to get in front of people digitally and it may be taken away. It has become too easy to create and publish ads that seek to push products or to promote our [marketing/sales] interests rather than providing value to the audience where they are in the buyer’s journey.
As more and more people utilize multiple devices for different stages of the funnel, it will be increasingly important to tailor ads and ad copy to specific topics and devices to each of the stages in the funnel.
A similar problem haunts content marketing. In the CMI report, 88 percent of marketers surveyed stated that their organization uses content marketing. However, only 30 percent stated that they were effective content marketers.
It would be easy to blame the tactic and move on, but when one looks at how many organizations in the report have a documented content strategy - 32 percent - it’s no wonder marketers are feeling ineffective.
The Increase in Ad Blockers Is A Signal
The rise of ad blockers over the last few years is not the apocalyptic message many people would like you to believe it is.
It is a signal from the end users, in that particularly tech-savvy audience, that they are not interested in these forms of advertising. This content is not relevant to them; the how-to video, music video or article is what they were looking for in the first place.
This means that moving forward, relevant and interesting content is what audiences are looking for. More importantly, we need to make it easy for people to find the content they are looking for when they are looking for it.
We need to stop jumping to logic-based, feature/benefit messaging when we are trying to draw awareness. Utilizing interest- and behavior-based marketing for the top of the funnel activities will elicit the kind of responses we are looking for at that particular stage.
More Isn’t Better. Better Is Better.
An interesting statistic from the CMI report is that a higher percentage of the least effective content marketers plan on creating even more content in 2016 than they did in 2015.
Rather than throwing more content and dollar bills at the wall hoping something will stick, we need to create better content. We can do this by:
Establishing a strategy that includes the various media: paid, owned, rented and earned
Developing audience personas
Measuring the behavior and journeys of those personas
Creating key messages for each stage of the buyer’s journey
Creating variations of the key messages for each of the platforms you’ll be using
Experiment, measure, analyze, repeat, repeat, repeat
Try some of the harder tactics, like an event; they can be more effective at building, reaching and converting audiences.
As difficult as it can be to do this, block off some time in your calendar and dive into how you can incorporate some of these ideas. Once you’re able to stop from only using the most readily accomplished tactics, you’ll be able to provide real value to your current and future customers.
[This post originally appeared on the Risdall Marketing Group blog and has been posted with a rel canonical]
