I came across a great blog post today from @captora with some really powerful stats on the rise of content marketing in recent years.

There is no doubt that the stats are convincing – content marketing is here to stay and I don’t think you’ll get much of an argument from any modern marketers.

So here’s my problem – if my hypothesis is correct and there is an acceptance that content marketing needs to be central to any marketing strategy there must be something else that is stopping people from getting involved.

I think there is a general fear of content marketing – largely driven by the fact that it is often accompanied by the word ‘strategy’. This immediately conjures up visions of 100 page documents and puts people right off.

So, to try and dispel this fear I’ve taken two of the key stats from the @captora post and asked 2 important questions:

1. What does this mean for your company?
2. What can you do about it?

Here we go:

Stat #1:
There are 27 million pieces of content shared each day online

What does this mean for your company?

This is one hell of a big number – you need to understand how much of this content relates to your industry, to the products you are selling. This will vary hugely depending on whether you’re involved in a mass market consumer product or a niche engineering application for example.

What can you do about it?

1. Understand what your goal is – what does success look like? Sales, website visitors, video views, increased followers, more enquiries?
2. Two ears, one mouth – use them in that proportion.
3. Search online for content relating to your industry (Google Alerts are a great way to do this).
4. Search Twitter to see who in your industry is doing this stuff well – and understand why.
5. Once you’ve done this initial research you will better understand what content you can produce that is suitable for sharing, likely to get a response and will ultimately lead to more sales leads (or whatever your overall goal is).
6. Start recording these ideas in an editorial calendar and hey presto – your content marketing strategy is underway.

Stat #2:
The number of web searches for ‘content marketing’ is up 400% since January 2011

What does this mean for your company?

Take comfort in the fact that this suggests to me that there are a lot of people out there who don’t understand how to make the most of this opportunity.

The opening line of the @captora post says “Content marketing has become a buzzword in modern marketing”.

Content Marketing is simply the latest way to describe what marketers have always done – produce good content. It’s nothing particularly revolutionary. Your tone might have to change and adapt to the social media channels that you are using in order to get the best results but otherwise – keep on keeping on.

What can you do about it?

Once you’ve developed the first run at your editorial calendar then select the channels that are right for you and just get started.

I’m reminded of a quote from Thomas Edison that is relevant to this discussion:

“I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

Hopefully you’ll get the hang of it well before the 10,000 mark – but the only way you’ll really find out what works and what doesn’t is to get started. Set yourself some small objectives at the start that you think will help you achieve your overall goal – increased sales, donations to your charitable cause, views of your Youtube videos.

There are a number of other interesting stats in the @captora post and I’ll return to these at a later date.

Hope you found this post useful – if you did please remember to share with your network.

You can follow me on twitter @petracmarketing

And if you want some help developing your content marketing strategy then get in touch.