Content consumption is no longer a choice, it's innate. If you own a smartphone, tablet, or laptop, chances are you're absorbing content the majority of the time that you're awake. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, mobile apps, and many other tools and mediums continue to provide us with news. It's endless and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
PAN Communications recently conducted a brief survey, reaching out to a group of qualified marketers and asking them to answer a few questions about content in 2012.
How Marketers Are Consuming Content
As a marketer, what type of content consumer are you? According to the survey, online news sites, Twitter, and blogs seem to be marketers' favorite sources of content:
Questions to consider: Will Twitter one day overtake online news sites as the main information source? Are we, because of content overload, starting to lean toward sound bites vs. full-length articles?
Marketing Now vs. Five Years Ago
Not surprisingly, more digital content creation and more online engagement are the main differences between how marketers market now and how they did so five years ago.
Companies are also beginning to understand and embrace the importance of CEO visibility and engagement, however. The voice of executive leadership—potentially the most reliable and truly transparent method of engaging with customers—is only at 19.6% according to the survey, but that's likely to increase.
Measuring Social Media
Measurement of social media remains a pain point for CMOs as the executive table still wants to know what their ROI is. Although Google Analytics is still the go-to measurement solution according to the survey, social media monitoring and engagement tools such as Radian6 and Sysomos are increasing market share.
Companies are placing heavier emphasis on engagement, and so a brand's overall footprint is becoming a priority. The ability to track and monitor conversations that are taking place around your brand or products in real time is priceless.
Measurement is becoming less and less about who went to what page and how many times. Overall impact and what it means for your business is the bottom line.
We'll be keeping an eye on the trends that we think will continue to gain strength and will follow up with another survey in the coming months. In the meantime, let's start a discussion. How has your company changed its marketing techniques in the last five years? How often do you evaluate your content production and how engaging and integrated it is?
