Brands

The Cure to CMOs’ Top 3 Concerns? Smarter Content Marketing

What keeps CMOs up at night?

According to a recent survey from Korn Ferry, via MarketingCharts, the top three answers are: 1) creating sustainable and engaging customer relationships and improving the customer experience; 2) taking advantage of digital trends in social and mobile; and 3) demonstrating marketing’s ROI.

CMO Concerns

The good news is each of these three top concerns can be addressed head-on with a stronger and smarter content marketing strategy.

Let’s break down these pain points and discuss how:

1. Creating sustaining and engaging customer relationships (34 percent)

Content is the only proven way to build relationships with people over time, by engaging them on a daily basis and entertaining them or helping them solve pain points in their lives.

American Express created OPEN Forum for its consumer base of small business owners to commune online, share advice, and receive career help from the site’s robust daily output of multimedia content. The hub attracts over one million visitors each month.

(Full disclosure: American Express is a Contently client.)

Similarly, social media scheduling app Buffer launched its own blog to cover social media marketing strategy, quickly growing to over a million monthly readers thanks to its awesome, actionable tips. The blog not only attracts new Buffer users, but also keeps those customers coming back for more.

2. Taking advantage of digital technology trends (27 percent)

When you’re a business, experimenting with new technologies to create content and analyzing the data around the things you publish can provide fascinating insights and put you way ahead of the curve.

This is what makes BuzzFeed so effective. Their goal is to “try a bunch of new features, and fast” and learn from those experiments. How do they draw 150 million monthly viewers? They’re constantly trying new things, analyzing the data, scrapping what doesn’t work, and pushing forward fast with what does. BuzzFeed’s editorial direction could be described as: “Whatever the data tells us is going to go bonkers on the social web.”

That ethos, and a commitment to evolving data analytics, lies at the heart of their incredibly effective content strategy.

3. Demonstrating marketing’s ROI (26.5 percent)

The ROI of content can be measured far more effectively than most think—as long as you’re looking at the right metrics.

It’s common to hear marketers bemoaning the difficulty in tying content to business results, but that’s because many of them remain fixated on pageviews and likes—metrics that offer limited value for brand publishers. There’s no one metric to rule them all, but that’s a good thing.

As we detailed in “4 Keys to Calculating ROI for Content Marketers,” the ROI around content can be accurately calculated once you truly understand the modern always-on sales funnel, track and measure brand lift, and double down on metrics that measure the relationship you’re building with readers, such as engaged time and return visitors, and thread them together in a cohesive way.

Elusive customers, overwhelming data, and fuzzy ROI don’t have to be the monsters hiding under the CMO’s desk. Let content marketing be your nightlight so you can sleep soundly.

Contently arms brands with the tools and talent to become great content creators. Learn more.

Image by Shutterstock

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