It’s no secret that consumers have been, well, doing more consuming lately. Global Web Index found that over 80% of consumers say they consume more content than they did before the pandemic. We are living in an information overload environment where every marketing and sales team wants the same thing — to rise above the noise.
This is becoming increasingly challenging. Not only is the amount of content out there higher than previous years, but companies are delivering quality information. Edelman’s 2021 Trust Barometer found that businesses are currently the most trusted institution for information, above government, media, and NGOs. This puts businesses in a pretty good position, especially considering that content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing programs and generates 3x the number of leads. It only makes sense that more companies are taking advantage of a readily available audience.
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The downside? We’ve officially hit reader fatigue territory. Among B2B revenue leaders, 81% think that their target audiences are suffering from digital exhaustion. With so much quality content flying off the (digital) shelves, there’s a high degree of competition for audience engagement. Unfortunately, just putting the same old static content out into the wild won’t do the trick. You’re only adding to the noise. You’ve got to rise above the sea of sameness with your competitors. The question becomes: How do you do that when everyone else is also after that same result in a red ocean?
Content for content’s sake doesn’t equal value
Every piece of content that marketing or sales teams create and send out into the world needs to exist on the value chain somewhere. In other words, the consumer should receive value with every touch point whether it’s from marketing or sales. It’s easy to share information for the sake of sharing it, but without adding value, your consumers’ experience won’t be a positive one. Then before you know it — POOF! — they’re onto the next thing. That was it, you’ve missed your window.
For today’s consumers, receiving value from content means receiving a personalized experience. Buyers don’t want to see a generic message come across their screens. Odds are your competitors are creating engaging and personalized content, so if you aren’t doing the same, you’re already behind. Traditional static formats, like PDFs, lack the ability to be easily personalized, and only add to the increasingly complex and often contradictory stack of documents consumers and prospects are inundated with. Creating a valuable content experience through personalization will ultimately increase engagement with your audience. Thankfully, 83% of consumers are willing to share their data for a personalized experience.
That said, have you ever tried creating personalized content for a broad audience regularly? Marketing and sales teams are tasked to do so all the time. Just ask them how they feel about it. Historically, it hasn’t been easy to create or distribute.
Not only should your content add value, you have to do it at scale
Creating value-driven content for consumers and prospects means creating a seamless content creation engine at scale. Once you’ve figured what to say to your audiences, the task then becomes putting it in front of them in an engaging way. That could mean having a library of content readily available or systematically bringing your audience along a content consumption journey. With the overflowing amount of content being pushed to consumers and prospects right now, that job becomes harder.
Marketing and sales teams have to create and distribute content in a seamless fashion. Traditional static PDFs are cumbersome to create, challenging to personalize, and stunted in shareability. And they often rely on multiple team members, endless versions, and multiple distribution tactics. Therefore, the task just gets harder. What teams need is a new way of creating content to keep up with the demands of the experience-driven economy.
Think outside the traditional content creation box
Instead of relying on traditional PDFs, marketing and sales teams need to scale their content creation strategies by using an interactive content platform. This allows teams to create, share, and edit their content on the fly. It also breaks down traditional barriers that require an overbuilt team to produce a single asset. Today’s consumer needs don’t allow for that luxury. Marketers end up constantly trying to keep up with demand and slowly but surely falling by the wayside.
Creating personalized content experiences that are engaging isn’t impossible, it just means doing things differently than they’ve been done before — with new readily available tools that help templatize, adjust, and distribute content so it’s in the hands of audiences when they need it, where they need it. It’s time to leave static content in the dust and rise above the sea of overflowing content with an experience that consumers and prospects crave.
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