The increasing value of content
It’s the middle of 2020 and we’ve all been seriously talking about content for over six years now. My first Martech company was set up five years ago with the sole intent of supplying brands with a constant flow of content. I am fairly certain this will not be the first time you have read about the importance of content for inbound sales, yet still, so many companies are unwilling to make an investment into this area of their business.
Content can be expensive to create and the internet is already overflowing with textual, audio and visual versions of content. Ensuring that your content is significantly ranked or even consumed might seem like an impossible task to many. For some, it just doesn’t seem to make sense, but let me tell you why they are wrong.
For communications to be successful they need to be of value to the receiver, and it’s worth noting that, normally, a company’s original content tends to have the exact value that the target consumer is looking for. After all, you know your customer and customers likewise know you and, as a result, your original content is tailor-made to suit your target audiences. Even more important to note, is that original content provides companies with the ability to understand which content is better at converting which segment of your customer base.
To explain this in more detail, I will use Facebook Ad network as an example. Instead of general content, think specifically about the wealth of adverts that Facebook has to deliver. To do so, it determines the relevance of each advert to each of its user segments. If the advert reaches an optimum relevance to a segment then it will deliver the ad to those specific users. If it doesn’t reach that relevance then it won’t deliver the advert. This relevance rating is developed from the user’s previous behaviour, allowing Facebook to display fewer adverts to individual users, and focus distribution of adverts on reaching only those users that have a high chance of converting.
Now, few companies are getting value for their money from the content that they produce, very few brands are correctly re-purposing their original content, and even less are managing all of their content in a library.
Yet, over the next few years, we will have tools that, like Facebook, are able to: develop a profile on your customer; review the wealth of assets in your content library (DAM platform); and, ultimately, deliver the content that is most relevant and most likely to convert that user. Much like the way a smart salesperson can find an individual customer’s personal objections and provide the information required to alleviate their concerns and move the deal forward.
To some extent, this functionality does exist already within products like rasa.io, which delivers individually customised newsletters to your leads. This allows you to curate other, related blog sources while leaning on your own existing content library so that each customer receives a unique newsletter with articles that are helpful and relevant to them.
Artificial Intelligence is now being applied in more and more areas of Business Intelligence and Marketing, but this particular sector of AI Personalisation Platforms are already being rolled out and are expected to boom over the next few years.
Eventually, these platforms will be able to deliver tailor-made experiences that can completely automate our marketing and sales funnels. Bots will become our new sales team, and the content will be the voice of our brand.
To prepare for this inevitable scenario, I can’t stress enough that you should invest in creating that wealth of content. It is good that AI will find relevant content for your consumer to deliver from other sources, but unless you have your own library of content to support that, you may be left without a brand voice.
Unfortunately, high-quality, unique content, automatically created by AI, is still a few years away, although there are some expert teams currently working on it. Until then, it is down to us to keep plodding away on that keyboard.
