We know from Econsultancy’s content marketing survey just how important content marketing is seen to be by marketers with more than 90% of respondents believing at the time that content marketing will become more important over the next 12 months.

Yet less than half of companies have dedicated budgets (34%) or dedicated individuals (46%) for content marketing.

Q: Do you / your clients have a budget specifically for content marketing? 

During the roundtable we investigated why there was this seeming disparity between what is considered important and the reality in most organizations.

My seven key takeaways from the discussion are:

  1. Poor definition. Organizations need to better define what they mean by ‘content marketing’ as it is largely poorly defined which leads to difficulty in building business cases and getting investment.
  2. No strategy. Content marketing is a strategy and a ‘way of doing business’ rather than a channel yet most companies don’t consider it in this way.
  3. Poor measurement. Measurement needs to be a focus especially less direct metrics around brand and engagement.
  4. Complex organizational issues. Content is a system design challenge. Bands are built around the concept of products, price and interruption marketing (Still). Internal processes often stifle agile creativity.
  5. Wrong skill sets. Most companies don’t have enough “story tellers” that understand the power of great stories to engage consumers.
  6. Poor integration. Stories need somewhere to live and yet search, social and email functions are often siloed and not properly connected to the content team.
  7. Lack of investment. Technology needs to be enabled to allow content insight, content creation, content distribution and content measurement to be done at scale and to an acceptable governance level.

The overarching theme was that businesses have not yet accepted the change in thinking that is required to become a great content marketing business, even if they say they are. This leads to a lack of focus which in turn means low investment, poor execution and unreliable measurement.

For more, see Econsultancy’s new report into Digital Content Strategy.