Content Engagement Remains a Challenge for Brands [Report]

“Content is King!” has been marketing’s rallying cry for quite some time now, yet content engagement, and what that even means, remains a real challenge for brands. And more and more, brands who were dubious in the past have been getting on board the content train.They’ve seen firsthand (often by watching their competitors) the potential that content marketing has to allow them to educate, connect with, and engage with an audience, never mind how important content is as part of their overall lead gen efforts. This has led many a brand to throw big bucks at the production of digital content. The question is, are they creating quality content? And do they know what to do with that content, once it’s been created? The short answer is pretty much a resounding ‘no.’

In fact, the majority of brands face a challenge when it comes to gaining meaningful engagement (more on that one later) and anything like the ROI they might have expected from their content marketing spend. But if you’re watching brands do this, you’ve probably noticed that most branded efforts at content are little more than thinly veiled marketing messages and brand puffery. Delivering real value? All too often, not so much.

The Engagement Disconnect

BrightEdge’s recent Content Engagement Report takes a look at how content engagement—defined (for the purposes of the report) as traffic, conversions, and revenue—varied by industry. As this graphic shows, other than in the highly targeted hospitality sector, the results are disappointing, and in the case of the retail sector, deeply concerning.

Although the results for B2B Tech and manufacturing are comparatively low, it’s not much of a surprise that these sectors, with a narrower distribution network and a more focused target audience, score higher than retail. The low level of engagement in the retail sector is a clear indicator that their efforts to gain our attention by flinging massive amounts of content into the digital space—distributed to too wide of a customer base, (in my opinion)—are failing badly. The relative success of the hospitality sector, with the ability to produce content about specific venues and/or destinations people want to visit and learn more about, provides an example of what can be achieved when the customer base is highly targeted.

Mobile Versus Desktop

The study also took a look at how content engagement varies depending on the way it’s viewed. Interestingly, despite the clamor for all things mobile, it’s desktop views that seem to generate the most engagement, as this graphic from the report illustrates.

That may be due to the fact that most of us prefer to consume long-form content on the desktop, leaving simpler searches like “where is it,” “when does it open,” and “how much does it cost” to the convenience of our mobile devices. Whatever the reason, publishing content that doesn’t have a responsive design and can’t easily be read on mobile certainly won’t help the situation.

Quality Versus Quantity

So why are we seeing such an apparent poor return in terms of customer engagement from digital content? To my way of thinking, it comes down to this: Brands are often producing content just to feed the content machine, without having clear-cut goals and defined strategies in place, and without producing content specifically designed for the different stages of the customer journey. As mentioned earlier, they also all too often use content marketing as yet another place to push their brand messages, then wonder why it doesn’t work.

Content marketing is about much more than just writing content and hitting ‘publish.’ It’s about thinking about what your customers and prospects need, and writing content that serves those needs. Most brands, especially in the B2B space, fail to do that. They don’t write for their customers and prospects, they try to sell to them. They also use corporate blogs as a place to talk about their awards and accomplishments, which do nothing to serve their clients, solve their problems, or help them with trusted information along the path to purchase.

How Do You Measure Engagement?

Engagement itself is also often poorly defined. What, exactly does engagement mean? Does it mean blog comments? Does it mean likes and shares of content by others? In the big scheme of things comments on blog posts isn’t an indicator of success, as the vast majority of readers don’t comment. Social sharing/social proof is actually a valuable metric, but still not really much of a true measure of success and engagement with your content. Instead, think about things like how many readers read a blog post and then downloaded a gated white paper or case study as a result. Or how many readers liked what they were reading so much that they subscribed to the blog? What about how many readers were attracted to a piece of content and ultimately went on to another part of your website and took further action, maybe even submitting a contact request form. What about how many readers shared the content they found relevant to their community, via email? Are those metrics you’re tracking? If not, you should be. And you should definitely be connecting your content marketing efforts to your lead gen efforts, and tracking them in your CRM. In far too many instances, that isn’t happening at all.

There are many ways to think about engagement. Some are key performance indicators that can and should be used to judge the efficacy of your content marketing efforts; others are just soft metrics that have little value when it comes to evaluating results.

The BrightEdge study, while not providing any definitive answers to the challenge of getting more out of content marketing, does give an indication of the difficulties that brands face when it comes to the content equation. Producing content solely for the sake of producing content will never work. Content needs to have a purpose, fulfilling a need or solving a problem for the reader. It needs to be well designed, easy to read, and mobile friendly. Most importantly, it needs to serve the customer or prospect wherever they are in their respective customer journeys, and be driven by a strategy designed to lead them from one piece of content and connection to your brand to the next. Failing to do that means you’re spending time, money, and effort on something that is destined to deliver little, if any, value.

What do you think?

Additional Resources on this Topic:

Jump-Start Your Content Marketing With These 4 Strategies
Content Marketing Effective for Lead Gen But Most Difficult Tactic to Execute [Study]
How And Why Content Marketing Works

Graphics source: BrightEdge Content Engagement Report

photo credit: 6 Persona-Driven Steps To An Effective Content Marketing Strategy via photopin (license)