February 3, 2015 | less than a minute read

The Menu vs The Sausage: Content Marketing Difficulties

Passle

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you are hopefully aware that content marketing should be key to your business’s marketing plans this year. Content costs 62% less than traditional marketing, and generates 3 times the leads. Companies with an active blog are reporting 67% more leads than those without, but this does not mean privileging quantity over quality.

Ryan Skinner uses the analogy of the menu and the sausage to explain the two main challenges a business must tackle when creating content. ‘The menu’ means having a clear strategy for content (62% of B2B and 65% of B2C marketing organizations do not have one surprisingly), so that the content is relevant to your target audience. ’The sausage’ refers to the process of making and distributing content, which doesn’t necessarily mean creating 100% new content.

One way of solving both challenges of course, is to curate content relevant to your target audience by subscribing to publications relevant to your field and then sharing their insights with your followers.

The problems of content marketing apply to you as a marketer whether you’re actually practicing “content marketing” or not. In any enterprise, there’s a New York Times-scale amount of content getting produced.[i] And your customers are hoovering up content (from a brand or otherwise, in many channels, interchangably) and making decisions based upon it.[ii] That means you’re in the content business. And the more customers control the purchase path, the more marketers find themselves in the content marketing business.