Trends & Takeaways: Giving Content Development High Priority

Content Development:
Why it's more important to marketers than ever before

This week we discuss one of the biggest marketing trends that will continue to grow in importance throughout the year -- and decade. Content development is here to stay. Click "continue reading" to read this week's Trends and Takeaways from Gold Lasso.

Trend
A recent trend shows that content development is one of the most important strategies to emerge from practicing multi-channel marketing. As a result of fragmented marketing channels and short consumer attention spans, the need to develop different types of content (blogs, video, white papers, email, etc.), often, has become the Achilles’ heel of multi-channel marketing. Even as marketing automation technologies become prevalent, content development continues to be difficult since it requires human thought and creativity. In fact, there is a direct correlation between marketing automation and content development. Simply put, segmentation and micro-targeting, two major elements of marketing automation, applied across multiple channels (Web, mobile, email, social – even traditional), requires multiple content versions.

Takeaway
As content creation is increasingly important, so is the allocation of budgets to those creative pursuits. As we’ve discussed in the past (http://goldlasso.com/learning-center/the-from-line-blog/entry/cost-shifts-from-channel-to-production-growing-need-to-educate-marketing-staff#axzz1IEfEqPMK), marketing dollars are shifting from airtime and presence toward the production of crafting high volume of messages. Strategizing on unique ways to personalize marketing messages and engage with your customers continuously is difficult. Success will require large time and resource commitments however don’t be intimidated if you are the marketing department. One-man bands can still be effective.

How To
Make sure content creation is given top priority by your marketing department. In order to develop fresh content on a regular basis, we offer some tips for generating ideas for articles, videos, podcasts or virtual events:

• Survey. Ask people at signup to submit topics of interest. Either use a survey form or give them a free-text area to type questions and suggestions. Take it a step further by then customizing offers based on their demographics or past purchases.
   
• Help. One great way to influence opinions of you and your brand is to offer advice on topics you know best. Offer video tutorials or podcast versions of your most popular blog posts to extend the life of existing content. This will make your job much easier.
   
• Lurk. Visiting social sites like Twitter, participating in newsgroups and forums such as Quora enable content marketers to know what people want to hear and what they enjoy discussing.
   
• Involve. Interview industry or product experts and solicit opinions. Everyone wants a voice and many qualified professionals will give it to you for free.

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