LORENZO CORANO:

Content marketing is the use of content as a means of reaching potential customers. These are the people who are familiar with your brand.

A typical approach for a brand is to produce a bunch of short-form or repetitive content that is easily disseminated throughout the Internet and recommended by traditional forms of marketing. Your Facebook page updates, blog posts, videos, infographics, and newsletters are all components of content marketing. In many cases, these short pieces of content make up the majority of the content generated by a business.

Unfortunately, this type of marketing does not resonate with the average consumer, especially millennials. These consumers will open to digital content, such as tweets, links, and Facebook posts, as opposed to these short pieces of content.

Even though the benefits of content marketing are extensive, it is not perfect. According to the marketing consultant Michael Cook in the “Solving The Marketing Divide: A New Era in Collaborative Product, Service, Technology, and Sales Innovation,” that not all brand customers embrace the content-rich marketing approach the same way. A key component of content marketing is the fact that the majority of users are in a virtual environment. Cook says that users of content are primarily social media participants who receive and distribute content through their social media networks. Cook defines content consumption and distribution as a “virtuous cycle” of customers utilizing the channels that provide the most value.

Even though there is a certain basic structure that governs content creation, consumers do not want to read brand’s content in a format that is not helpful or entertaining. Content in your company’s informational or promotional pages must provide value and also be eye-catching. Those who consume content are inherently knowledgeable about your brand and are inclined to read content that provides value, which in turn leads to more sales. Content must work well as a source of sales, but a successful content strategy also requires the development of meaningful engagement strategies. Consumers are conscious of how they spend their time.

An example of a successful content strategy would be one that mimics human attention spans, in which you release short, social content in a bite-sized format with a high probability of getting through. Alarm clocks are among the most popular tools to manage time, and similar attention-hogging tactics can be used with social media. A “timeline” is also a popular way of organizing what people have already had time to view. Facebook timelines are transparent, showing the history of a user’s posts while giving a reasonable minimum amount of space to display the posts’ content. A simple, organized design that displays only the most important information can give users a clarity of where to click next.

To make content marketing work, it must work on all facets of the marketing stack–consultants and agencies, supply chain and manufacturing, IT and data, and sales–which does not happen today. Learning more about the framework and techniques to develop, distribute, and demonstrate an engaging content strategy is the first step to marketing your company to customers.