Strategies for B2C Content Creators and Marketers

While content is certainly king for Internet lead generation in B2B organizations, adoption of this tactic is taking off for consumer-facing companies as well. Ninety percent of B2C marketer’s firms are actively engaged in content marketing, and 60 percent will boost their budgets in the next year, according to the report, “B2C Content Marketing: 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – North America,” released by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.

The study also found nearly three-quarters of companies are producing more content than they were last year, highlighting the growing importance of blogs, articles, videos, infographics, and more as a significant source of lead generation. E-newsletters were highly effective for B2C companies.

Similar to the previous report from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs on B2B content marketing trends, consumer-facing organizations with a documented strategy outperformed those that didn’t have a plan.

The high volume of content challenges

Many B2C industries are highly competitive. If another company has slightly better content marketing tactics, a business can lose customers. Because consumers have greater access to information than ever before, it can be more difficult for companies to maintain loyalty. Organizations need to evolve the ways they reach and connect with customers in order to retain clients and increase loyalty.

Because of the astronomical popularity of content marketing, more materials are being produced every second. Marketing Land cited statistics that revealed 100 hours of video footage are uploaded to YouTube every minute, 55 million photos are added to Instagram every day and Google’s search index is almost 40 billion pages. With the massive amount of content created and published every day, it’s harder for marketers to stand out, especially in tightly competitive markets.

Many organizations take the approach that more content is better than higher quality in an effort to attain better visibility than their competitors through search engine optimization. However, this is not an effective strategy because changes to Google’s algorithm rate relevant content sources higher in the search results than websites that are updated with subpar blog posts every day.

SEO strategies and content marketing need to go hand in hand, and simply placing branded and unbranded keywords is no longer enough to get companies the results they want from content. The MarketingProfs study found many B2C organizations are scrambling to produce enough content, but without an emphasis on quality and relevancy, their efforts may fall flat.

How B2C marketers can win at content

Many competitors may be increasingly able to produce a larger amount of content. Instead of trying to outdo them, marketers should identify what their companies do best and design a strategy around that. Some types of content may be more effective for certain industries.

Many organizations that are succeeding at content marketing use social media to highlight posts. Quality content is inherently shareable, which can increase the effectiveness of this tactic. Since these strategies can be time-consuming, marketing automation can help B2C companies with publishing content. With a platform that aids with posting, marketers can focus on generating high-quality content that is relevant to the target audience.