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Marketing has been using content throughout the entirety of its history in order to drive customer attention to their campaigns and their related elements. However, the fact that the product or service for which the advertising is usually done prioritizes the former to get the point across about why the consumer should buy the same was the norm for quite some time. In the world of today, this focus has shifted greatly; digital marketing is now customer focused, and the product or service acquires a secondary form of importance in the content itself. This is certainly the most obvious part of the evolution in content marketing. But, it doesn’t stop there; as this niche is expanding, as well as constantly shifting across such areas as website content, micro-content etc. To get a better picture, you should look forward to some ten years before where the present state of content marketing actually came forth.

The rise of social media

During the tail end of the 2000s, it was quite evident that social media was going to be the ‘next big thing’ for the world. What it meant for the marketing industry was a subtle shift of consumer power for the audiences, as they got opportunities to interact with one another in sharing information about a brand, product or service. The shift of the overlying content marketing business model was needed through which this recognition of power for consumers was essential, and the need to tailor marketing content with the changing times also started to take shape.

The brands facilitating in making the voices of people heard

When the effects of social media first became apparent, many of the companies tried to create their own online versions of social media platforms. This was done to capitalize off a nascent software technology, which had unprecedented potential. However, different instances of failure in readymade supply of social media platforms made the scenario quite clear- people were only going to use a few social media brands, and others need to capitalize upon such platforms’ immense pool of audience. Inbound marketing content strategy became the focus of transferring the attention of consumers to their own product, which utilized essential tools upon social media to produce maximum effect.

The Golden Age of Content Marketing?

In the wake of the changes, it became quite evident that the entire scenario of digital marketing industry was shifting fast, and at an unprecedented rate. Content marketing tools came to the forefront as almost every leading company started to establish their own effective creator and publishing teams, realigning and re-constituting their marketing teams. Moreover, content marketing CRM (Customer Relationship Management) took drastic steps in innovating, and diversifying the entire field of service as a whole.

At present, India and the entire world at large are seeing the age of marketing whereupon content creators and publishers have far more importance than at any point of time in history. Complex content marketing networks are being formed in terms of best exposing any kind of content to the most appropriate audience. Such networks are headed by ‘influencers’ nowadays who are essentially the individuals who have a large audience at their disposal. Simply speaking, where content marketing is currently heading is anyone’s guess!    

Ranjit Specializes in Digital Marketing Product Management, Social Media, paid and organic search space. He has a vast experience in wealth management space and on Emission trading market. Before BankBazaar Ranjit was heading Digital marketing at Aditya Birla Online Fashion Pvt. Ltd. (abof). In this conversation, Ranjit explains how BankBazaar has implemented Content Marketing in their overall marketing strategy.  

Santosh: Content Marketing is seen as an integral part of the marketing mix and complements the overall marketing strategy. How have the efforts and budget for content marketing evolved in your organization?

Ranjit: Content marketing is a key pillar for BankBazaar as we firmly believe that good and relevant content assist users to make the right decision. At BankBazaar content started forming an integral part of marketing five years back and since then a budget contribution towards right content creation and dissemination has been increasing significantly. Through our data-driven models, we have enough evidence to show that content feeds into a lot of top and middle of funnel inflows and over time these users get nurtured to convert.

Santosh: How has social media helped in increasing BankBazaar’s consumer engagement?

Ranjit: BankBazaar is one of the FinTech which has been a pioneer in using social media for enhanced consumer engagement. We have used multiple forms of content like a topical subject, video, conversational content, snippets, etc. to keep users engaged in a way that they can make better financial decisions. Some of the top social media platforms which have worked for us are LinkedIn, Facebook and Quora. Good, relevant and engaging content has helped our Brand to be one of the top choices for any financial needs.

Santosh: Video has emerged as a dominant communication format. How do you go about planning and implementing a video content strategy?

Ranjit: At BankBazaar we have a well-planned annual video strategy as this format is getting consumed now far more than any other format of content. Our internal content data and secondary research data also backs the fact the current generation and new generation will primarily prefer video formats. Our conviction in video as a content format is so much that we have dedicated an internal team to conceptualize and create relevant and topical BFSI content. At BankBazaar we make multiple content formats but, our most favored content are small video snippets as most of the video content is consumed when the user is on the go. YouTube and Facebook have consistently been our preferred channels for content dissemination. These platforms have helped us to reach the right audience and with some strong analytics we have been able to consistently finetune our content

Santosh: What are the best practices you follow when it comes to measuring the effectiveness/success of content strategy?

Ranjit: There are multiple long term and short-term metrics we track to know the effectiveness of our content strategy. We have a well-planned content strategy for various financial verticals and churn different formats of content round the year.

Short term content effectiveness is measured in the following ways:

• Content/Video read and completion rate.
• Post content consumption the next step was taken by the user i.e. if users are getting nurtured and moving down the funnel to enquire or buy a product.
• User behavior on the site for the segment exposed to content and the one not exposed to content.
• The propensity of users who have consumed content to come back for more.

Long term content effectiveness:

• The broad topics around which annual content is planned, the overall trend in content consumption for those topics
• Brand BankBazaar association with those topics in search, social and other UGC contents
• Users who are interacting with these content topics, how these user segments have proved superior or inferior from a business conversion/revenue point of view.

Santosh: How would you rate your organization’s proficiency with the use of content marketing technology? Which are the key tools that assist your content marketing efforts?

Ranjit: I would personally rate BankBazaar as one of the leading companies using content marketing for superior user engagement. These are some of the key tools used to create and measure our content marketing efforts:

• Social listening platform Meltwater
• Adobe Photoshop, video creator, Google Ignition Labs, and other standard photos/video enhancers
• Internal content management system
• Google Analytics for content effectiveness measurement
• Analytics from content platforms like YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, LinkedIn

Private communication mediums have come a long way since the origin of smoke signals and pigeon mail, but the essential value has persisted as the same – human connection. Fast forward a few decades and human connection have become so effortlessly obtainable through social media channels, it’s practically intolerable to go a few hours without longing a new blog, tweet or post.

The origin of tech-savvy social scavengers and the blogs they read is music to the ears of content marketers, as this association delivers them with the seamless platform to distribute their content.

The social media challenge

Creating and setting up a Facebook page or Instagram account and producing a few likes and followers is one thing; generating a complete social media tactic is quite another. Before embarking on a social media task, content marketers should decide precisely what they want to attain from each social page – whether that creates traffic, enhance visibility or upsurge brand value – and how they’re planning to achieve this. Digital marketing is all about these aspects.

Creating brand value

Creating an exclusive brand name can’t be attained by imitating what other brands are doing. Christopher Szczepaniak, Chief Content Officer at Stratego House, accept as true that in order for content marketing to move beyond the memes of social media, it needs to use more cultured social and content marketing tools, such as podcasts, infographics, eBooks, videos and animations.

In addition, content marketers need to provide material that folks can use, to the point where they will jump to consume more. Social media scavengers have moved past the ‘look at me’ phase and are more attentive on what you can offer them.

Less might not be more

Socially optimized firms are far more in tune with the wants of their spectators than those that aren’t, but how optimized do you really need to be today? Having numerous social media networks for one firm is now usual practice. Remember, there’s more to social media than just Twitter, and different channels are ideal for different brands and their goals.

Enter the community manager

Much the same as reporters are now essential to a company’s editorial strategy, community managers are a vastly sought-after participant of the content marketing/social media package. 2019 is the year for businesses to move past the social media rookie who fiddles around on Facebook and let a skilled community manager take complete charge of the content marketing networks.

As Global Lead – Digital Marketing, Sooraj Divakaran has successfully managed all aspects of marketing: digital marketing, social media, digital development (website platform and mobile apps), analytics, content strategy, interface design, and usability. Besides work, Sooraj writes about Marketing on his blog (Digital Uncovered) which currently ranks among the top hundred blogs on marketing in India on IndiBlogger. Some of his content has been published on Forbes India, School of Digital Marketing, Paul Writer, and Scatter.

Santosh: Content Marketing is seen as an integral part of the marketing mix and complements the overall marketing strategy. How have the efforts and budget for content marketing evolved in the organization?

Sooraj: We have scaled our content marketing efforts over the past few years. As a team, we are now focused on mining stories within the organization, across both employer branding and thought-leadership initiatives. Content distribution is also integral to our strategy as traditionally, we have only focused on social and e-mail as channels to disseminate content. Now the focus is shifting to content syndication and partnerships as we expand the reach of our content.

Santosh: In the Survey, you mentioned that Measuring content effectiveness as the top challenge you face while developing a Content marketing strategy. How are you tackling it in your organization? Also, how technology plays a role here? 

Sooraj: Most organizations struggle when it comes to justifying costs related to content marketing. We have over the last year deployed the core components of our marketing technology stack – CMS, Marketing Automation Platform and CRM. We will be adding more tools to our stack to build advanced attribution capabilities to link leads to clicks and impressions. The idea is to build full funnel metrics to showcase greater cause and effect as a function.

Santosh: How would you rate your organization’s proficiency with the use of content marketing technology? Which are the key tools that assist your content marketing efforts? 

Sooraj: We are only getting started. Technology is critical to content marketing, right from researching possible topics/keywords to measuring the effectiveness of content. Currently, we use tools like SEMRush, Adobe Analytics, Lead Squared, etc. We plan to include more tools as we move forward to develop full-funnel metrics.  

Santosh: How has the use of Social Media for Content Marketing changed in your company, compared with one year ago? 

Sooraj: Social media continues to be our core distribution channel when it comes to content marketing. We have set-up an in-house team to scale our video marketing efforts. The video content developed internally has seen considerable success. The idea to experiment with new forms of storytelling including interactive content, augmented reality, etc.

Santosh: How successful is your organization at tracking the ROI of content marketing? What metrics do you use to measure content marketing success? 

Sooraj: We evaluate our effectiveness using a range of business and vanity metrics. The focus, however, is on improving the consumption of content across the defined target audience. 

Santosh: Your blog – Digital Uncovered, ranks amongst the top hundred blogs on marketing in India on IndiBlogger. As an expert blogger, can you define best practices that you follow while creating a content piece? 

Sooraj: At the core of good content is empathy for the reader/user. Every piece of content that I have published on my site is to help someone who has sought answers to the same questions. The recommended best practices for content marketers include building your audience before you need them, writing for an audience and not for the search engine and always remember that real influence is always built offline (augment your online efforts with events/workshops/sessions, etc.).

Apurva Chamaria is currently the Chief Revenue Officer at RateGain, world’s leading SaaS provider to travel and hospitality sectors. In his previous stint at HCL, Apurva headed corporate marketing and was responsible for brand marketing, employer brand, employee marketing, thought-leadership, digital marketing, analytics, finance and Marcom. Under his leadership HCL debuted at: 1) InterBrand Top 100 Brands at 19, grew 35% y-o-y in brand value 2) Brand Finance Global 500 ’17 at 378 with a value of 4.46 Bn US$. Between 2014-18 the HCLT brand campaigns won 130 global awards.

Santosh: Content Marketing is seen as an integral part of the marketing mix and complements the overall marketing strategy. During your 18 years of industry experience how has the efforts and budget for content marketing evolved?

Apurva: Content is the heart of any marketing strategy. In fact, the quality of content defines the success and failure of a marketing campaign. In my 16 years of experience, I’ve seen a consistent increase in the efforts, budget and professionalism in content marketing. In my view, a fantastic design coupled with great content itself has a viral and engaging capability. We must never forget that consumers don’t watch ads or read branded content, they watch/read stories and at times the best ones can be branded content/ads.

Santosh: What are your top content marketing challenges? How do you tackle them?

Apurva: Some of the top content marketing challenges that I’ve witnessed are:

• Lack of good resources who can write high-quality business-centric content without making it boring. We occasionally outsource content development to industry experts/ freelancers/ agencies.

• Speed: Most of the times, it’s required to deliver high-quality content on short notice. We have created templates for various content types to shorten delivery time.

Santosh: How would you rate your current organization’s proficiency with the use of content marketing technology? Which are the key tools that assist your content marketing efforts?

Apurva: We extensively use & leverage some of the best content marketing tools:

• Google alerts for listening around topics, brand, and influencers
• Hootsuite for social media content scheduling
• Grammarly for checking grammar mistakes
• Pardot for email communication as a part of content dissemination
• WhatsApp & SharePoint for internal communication
• Google analytics (incl. using utm_content & utm_term) to track content performance

Santosh: How has the use of Social Media for Content Marketing changed in RateGain, in the last couple of years?

Apurva: It has increased tremendously, no. of posts, followers and engagement rate have improved significantly over the last 2 years. We’ll be focusing more on including diverse content types this year and strategies to improve no. of followers. Video content is a huge focus for us.

Santosh: What metrics do you use to measure content marketing success? 

Apurva: Engagement on social media, unique visitors to website, avg. time on page, bounce rate, no. of downloads, leads, pipeline and revenue mapped with the content asset.

Santosh: How do you think AI will shape content Marketing in the coming years?

Apurva: It’s going to only increase and esp. because there’s a need to get more attention from prospects and learning and predicting user interest so that more meaningful content can be served to them is the only way to get user attention and potential business. Chatbots are used extensively these days to provide generic automated responses but whether the bot predicts or anticipate user response or for that matter even the need and then serving the right response is the key.

Santosh: In your latest book, Master Growth Hacking, you have stressed the importance of the combination of coding, data intelligence, and marketing. Could you explain it further for our subscribers who are yet to read the book?

Apurva: Data intelligence will help you discover the insight, coding will allow you to build the right platforms based on those insights and marketing will enable distribution of the platform/content. Anyone without the other two will find it hard to get traction. All three of them are going to be critical elements to work on for a compelling growth plan in the future.