Ditch ‘campaign thinking’ to succeed at content marketing, says Isentia’s Todd Wheatland
Content marketing is not driven by campaigns, but is a strategy underpinned by being “totally audience centric”, Todd Wheatland, chief advisor at Isentia Strategy and Content division – formerly King Content – has said.
Presenting at Mumbrella’s Publish Conference today, Wheatland pointed the difference between content and content marketing, describing the latter as a strategy with a business outcome.
Wheatland presenting at Mumbrella’s Publish Conference this morning.
“There’s a big difference between content and content marketing and there’s a difference between campaign thinking, which is the traditional agency model,” Wheatland said.
“For me the essence of content marketing is that it’s not a campaign driven thing, it’s a strategy you have a business outcome you are driving towards and you are incrementally improving and you have an active revision of that strategy along the way.”
“Campaigns absolutely form a secondary layer to activate that or achieve certain targets along that way but you have an underpinning that you know what is always on and what is always happening and what is the commitment we are making to that audience, that is actually going to drive this engagement.”
Also in the session, Wheatland described Australia as being in the “bubble phase” of video production.
He said over the last couple of years, video has subsumed other forms of marketing in terms of budget allocation but said: “That of course led to this dramatic escalation in the sheer volume of content and of course the associative volume of crap content but that is very much the game we are seeing played right now.”
“Some of the primary challenges of this for all of us is that the vast majority of video consumption is taking place off channel,” he added.
“We are seeing this massive and ongoing growth in the sheer scale of video production that is taking place.”
But he said in terms of financial outcome, “crap” content was meaningful.
“If you are a publisher with 100,000 pages plus on your site, and you know that a search engine will reward a page that has an embed page that has a video on it, higher than a competitor that doesn’t, then the cost efficiency of producing 100,000 pieces of crap and embedding on those pages and getting a page lift in Google Search actually has meaningful financial impact,” he said.
However Wheatland admitted video content was reaching saturation point and warned no one has quite seen beyond that point.
Looking to the future, Wheatland said the focus should be on leveraging a brands current assets, taking stories and using employees to counter the narrative that is taking place externally.
Commenting on a question around brands who liked to keep control, Wheatland said: “The control rests in what is the actual truth, what is the authentic story that we want to be able to counter or create a narrative in the marketplace and then how can we define a safe way for that first group to determine does this work or not.”
“Think of any contentious issue, think of horse racing, greyhound racing – the future survival for those sorts of industries is absolutely listening to the issues that are most challenging and authentically addressing them and ultimately that is going to resolve in some form of changed environment.”
So true. Getting the strategy right is most important.
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