“This part of the marketplace is not going away,” says Randy Cohen, CEO of Advertiser Perceptions. “There is optimism. More people are trying to fit content into what they’re doing.”
Of the various kinds of content marketing, digital native advertising tops the list of preferred formats, with 51% of respondents indicating that’s what they use the most. Defined as in-feed content-based advertising, including digital advertorials, digital native led all other forms by more than 30 percentage points. Thought leadership (defined as trend stories and op-eds) was second, with 20% of respondents indicating they use it most. Custom print was next, with 16% of respondents, and ebooks and white papers were the least common format, with 12% of respondents indicating it’s their most frequently-used form of content marketing.
Part of this relates directly to the ability of marketers to take on content-marketing projects. “Digital advertising is easy to do,” Cohen says. “We know from our own activities, the thought-leadership stuff is much better, but it’s so much harder to do.”
(This, of course, explains why so many “content studios” have proliferated among media companies in the last three years—to help companies that don’t have the internal bandwidth to get projects done on their own.)
Respondents also indicated that when they do launch content-marketing initiatives, their main objective is brand awareness. This points to one of the perennial debates around content marketing, especially in the digital age, where KPIs and ROI are easily measurable and few marketing budgets are approved without those tracking mechanisms built in. On the one hand, content marketing is seen as having a different function—serving the top-of-the-funnel prospect, people who are looking to bond with a product before actually buying it. It’s about brand affinity and loyalty first—from which a customer can then be monetized in many ways. On the other hand, see the above about KPIs and marketing budgets.
Brand awareness clocked in as the top objective for 34% of respondents to the Advertiser Perceptions survey. Lead generation and lead nurturing were second, with 24% of respondents indicating that as the primary objective. They were was followed, respectively, by customer loyalty (17%); thought leadership (13%); and amplifying brand affinity and values (12%).
“If you’re doing content marketing that is one to many, your best hope is to achieve awareness, rather than getting measurable results,” Cohen says. “But people are still chasing impressions. You’re doing one thing and measuring another. All of the deeper content marketing is about brand experience as opposed to measurement of results.”
That said, Cohen continues, advertisers do use the data they get from native advertising to iterate on their creative. They want data to influence the next level of content that they create. Agencies in particular, he says, equate that measurement with really understanding the goals and visions of what their clients—marketers—are looking for in the first place. “We’re finding more and more of that,” Cohen says. “That’s a ray of optimism.”
All of these responses, Cohen suggests, point to the tension that sometimes exists in content marketing among publishers, marketers and agencies. To some extent, it’s always been at odds with organic media-company content.
“We see a dichotomy with native and organic content,” Cohen says. “Some do it really well, but the more automatic programmatic campaigns leave a lot to be desired. You can do much better if you understand the marketer’s vision and goals, and you don’t just track eyeballs. There’s an opening here for deeper content-marketing relationships. Marketers are asking for more, but agencies just want to get it done.”
Of the 300 respondents, 40% were marketers and 60% were agencies representing marketers.