Stop Marketing in Silos. Think Content First.

Marketing professionals work hard to distribute messages to their customers. Employing a combination of creative and calculated processes, brands, products and services are communicated across a market. However, in solving the question of “how” to distribute the message, marketers have fixated on the wrong combination of solutions.

Marketing in Silos

As creative professionals, marketers are drawn to “shiny” objects. Since the Internet’s infancy, marketers have honed in on the newest built silo. That shiny object got all of their attention, whether it was social media, email, SEO, mobile marketing or (fill in the blank with next shiny marketing strategy). There is one thing that cuts across all these tactics – content.

Content marketing is used by more than nine of 10 companies, and each company’s marketing team uses on average eight content tactics, according to a report from the Content Marketing Institute. However, these tactics are unnecessarily costly if individual messages are not integrated.

Producing tangibles across these silos, creating content that potentially fills each silo, is the real test of a marketer’s capability.

According to research from Junta42, a content marketing project management company, 60% of surveyed marketing professionals planned to increase budget allocations to content marketing.

Rather than hire SEO experts, social media consultants or mobile marketing gurus to handle each individual silo or channel, hire a Chief Content Officer who understands how to maximize content for distribution across these touch points.

What about the latest shiny object – Social Media?

Yes. Social media marketing is a powerful tool. The issue is not with social media marketing. Content needs a method of distribution, it does not move itself – no field of dreams “Build and they will come” mentality. Social media provides a flexible, interactive and immediate method of messaging. The problem is not social media, email or mobile platforms. Content marketing requires generating messages that are:

• Quality – starting with quality content makes optimizing across channels easier and provides seamless messaging
• Relevant – content that appeals to the target market and translates across silos
• Optimized – a professional that understands how to optimize a sole message across channels generates results from the marketing strategy as a whole, rather than focus on one silo that may lose a portion of the target population

Content marketing is more than creating and distributing words. It requires understanding the need to build holistic marketing campaigns that translate across silos or channels and present the message to the demographic creatively and consistently.