What Contently Winning Two Big Awards Says About the Future of Content Marketing

As Contently’s CEO, I get tasked with delivering both good news and bad news. Today, I get to talk about some good news and what it means for the future of content marketing.

Still, deciding to write this blog post wasn’t so easy. Contently is incredibly passionate about helpful, non-promotional content and storytelling. We tend to recoil at the idea of talking about ourselves—especially in the hallowed halls of The Content Strategist.

But recently, Contently won two awards that I’m really proud of as CEO: We were named the #1 Solution in G2’s Enterprise Content Creation Grid for the third time in a row, and we also won Bronze for Customer Success Team of the Year at the American Business Awards. And they got me in a reflective mood.

Content marketing is complicated. Content’s impact is vast; in today’s digital world, it’s a part of pretty much every meaningful touchpoint across the customer journey. You need to deeply understand your audience, manage competing stakeholders, and figure out how to tell the story of your success in a way that’ll make sense to your leadership team. It’s enough to make your head spin. Creating content is easy. Creating great content that truly performs for your business is hard.

This is what I have to explain to new board members when they ask, “Why is Contently’s business so complex?” Why do we need to offer data-driven content strategy and a global talent network within our content marketing platform? Why can’t it just be a simple tech play? Well, it’s because our customers need all three.

Enterprise marketers need strategy to be successful. They need to know their goals, KPIs, what content their audience craves, and how to stand out from the competition. This is foundational for any content program.

They need great technology that unifies their teams, saves them from the black hole time-suck of email and spreadsheets, and makes proving ROI easy (as our Analytics Suite and Content Value Tracker does).

And they need great content creation talent to tell stories that will truly break through to their audience, across formats like video, data storytelling, long-form reporting, and interactive content that just aren’t very easy to scale in-house.

The G2 honor matters so much to me because it’s based purely off customer reviews, and when I read reviews like the one below, it validates the bet we’ve made on listening to our customers and meeting their needs.

Winning Bronze for Customer Success Team of the Year, likewise, matters to me because of just how passionate this team is about helping our customers tell incredible stories. You will not find a harder working team of content nerds, who bring the art to the art and science of content.

As our head of marketing Joe “Lazer” Lazauskas has said, the content revolution is here. Those who tell the stories rule the world, and content and storytelling will only continue to grow in importance inside enterprise brands. Their existing needs will only increase as well. As content competition increases, brands will need better, more differentiated strategies. They’ll need technology that unifies more stakeholders and helps them optimize content faster. And they’ll need the help of the best storytellers in the world if they want to stand out.

Pictured: The Contently mural

I can’t wait. Twenty months ago, I wrote about why I was placing the biggest bet of my life on content. Today, it feels like I placed that bet on ethereum, because content is exploding in value. But more importantly, I see the future ahead of us. A future where all brands can tell incredible stories that deliver real value to the world, like Means & Matters, Bank of the West’s incredible sustainable storytelling hub. Where marketing budgets go towards creating content and experiences that helps people. Where brand voice isn’t a buzzword, but something you can feel reverberate through the important stories they tell.

As we head towards that future, we will keep pushing ourselves relentlessly to give marketers what they need to succeed.