Some of you have heard of Mark Schaefer’s Content Shocktheory. Put simply, content marketing is such an effective marketing strategy that we’ve become oversaturated, making it increasingly difficult for businesses to break through the noise.
Such was the case in a recent email Mark received from a sporting goods company that reported a startling decrease in Facebook reach and blog engagement the past year. Several of my customers can relate to this decline and many of my colleagues are experiencing the same. It’s a result of Content Shock. And, it’s only going to get worse.
Mark says we now shift from great content ‘rising to the top’ to great content as ‘merely the starting point.’ Always forward thinking, Mark says today’s content marketing will need to ignite! To ensure content is seen and interacted with, businesses will need to find creative and effective ways to share content on the web. Or, as Mark says, “Don’t just write. Ignite.”
From what we’ve experienced with our customers, I think Mark is spot on. The long-form publishing tool on LinkedIn is a great example. When it first became available, I heard stories from colleagues of 7-10,000 reads on the articles and hundreds of hits on their site. But, as the tool increased in popularity, those reads and hits were down to the hundreds and dozens, respectively. The content was still ‘strong,’ but fewer people were reading because it’s simply overused.
Are we fighting a losing battle? How do we even ignite content? For many, it’s still a struggle to create ‘strong content’ let alone content that ‘ignites.’ I certainly do not have the answer for every business, but I can give you a few ideas based on our experiments with our customers.
