Discover your content marketing maturity rating
In 2021, content marketing has become the most effective form of digital marketing, with 70% of consumers saying they prefer to discover new brands through content
Audiences are more sophisticated than ever before, habitually using online technologies to block traditional ads and skip TV breaks with streaming services. In short, content marketing has become digital marketing, the ubiquitous marketing strategy for brands.
Yet many organisations still struggle to effectively formalise their approach to content creation and amplification. At Mediablaze, we have developed a simple-to-use, online self-assessment tool that allows brands to benchmark their level of content marketing maturity in the industry — and take the right steps to improve their operation.
Developed over 10 years, our strategic model has been tried and tested by some of the world’s most innovative brands. And to help marketers understand the most common pitfalls faced by many marketing departments, we have broken down these challenges into five key areas:
Content strategy
Content marketing is not just about creating a library of well written blog posts and a handful of great looking social videos. The key to effective content marketing is ensuring that every piece has a clearly defined purpose. It must have a role to play in nudging audiences along the customer journey, ending in conversion. And identifying what brands want audiences to do at each stage of this journey requires a strategy.
People and processes
Process is everything when it comes to producing content efficiently and at scale. Too many brands are creating content in divisional silos that don’t deliver on the needs of the organisation as a whole. A centralised approach to content production, with company buy-in at the highest levels, is crucial if content is to be truly effective for all areas of the business.
Audience and experience
Too many brands are still creating content that focuses on what marketing departments want to tell customers, not what audiences want to know (or find out). In order to do this, marketers have to really understand their audience and what they want or need from the company’s brand or product. This relies on developing strong audience personas, and creating content that is genuinely useful to these prospective customers, as well as providing engaging digital experiences through which they can consume it. Done well, audiences will want to return to the brand, time and time again.
Amplification
Content marketing can only be effective if it is seen by the right audiences at the moment when they need information from a brand. To ensure this happens effectively, marketers need to employ paid media tactics to amplify their content at every customer touchpoint throughout the customer journey. This requires constant testing and optimisation to find the right mix of channels and formats, from SEO to paid social. Brands must benchmark, measure, test and optimise — this should be every company’s content marketing mantra!
Measurement and reporting
Knowing what data to collect and how to measure it is the secret sauce for any content marketing operation. Likes, shares and engagements may be comforting metrics to see, but they don’t truly measure the effectiveness of a brand’s content. Mature content marketing operations are using technologies like GA, Adobe and social pixels to really understand what audiences do as a result of engaging with a company’s content, enabling brands to make more of the stuff that actually works.
Sifting through spreadsheets to identify conversion and micro-conversion points is not glamorous. But it is effective. Successful brands have long since ditched vanity metrics and laser focused on the KPIs that produce real insights.
The four stages of content maturity
Our content marketing assessment model ranks organisations' level of maturity through four defined stages:
Ignition: the organisation is creating content but lacks a documented, organisation-wide strategy or centralised forum and process for forward content planning. Personas for audiences are not formalised and use of paid media is ad hoc. Results are not measured against clear business objectives or ROI.
Flame: the organisation has a strategy for content, but production is siloed and lacks relevant data inputs to improve effectiveness. Campaigns are amplified but are not generally measured beyond reach and engagement.
Fire: the organisation creates persona driven content, but lacks a clear understanding of customer journeys across digital touch-points. Content is mostly amplified and measured, but reports lack actionable insights for improvement and content consistency varies by platform and territory.
Inferno: the organisation's content strategy is regularly optimised through data-led insights and audience personas are served personalised content experiences, along clearly defined customer journeys. Paid media is used to amplify and optimise content through continual testing and attribution modelling ensures all platforms and formats have a clearly defined purpose.
How does your organisation’s content marketing capability stack up? Take our online test and we will use your input to give you a ranking…
Take our online test today
If you’re looking to tell meaningful stories that spark action from customers, deliver demonstrable ROI, or improve the efficiency of your content creation, then we can help. To find out how, get your free assessment today. Just give us eight minutes to complete 32 quick questions about your content marketing operation and we’ll give you a personalised assessment of your current set-up, with some actionable tips on areas to improve.
Take the test or contact one of our content marketing strategists to find out more.