Help Is On The Way: Publishers' In-House Content Studios
When considering how to improve your marketing effectiveness, there are so many variables in play that it can become an intimidating process. Tasked with such an important decision for facilitating the growth of their company, many water and wastewater equipment manufacturers and service providers are seeking outside counsel.
The make-up of outside counsel for marketing is changing. Thirty years ago, ad agencies would charge high premiums to develop colorful portrayals of your product or service and package it as a silent sales pitch. Today, astute agencies have made the transition to a more content-driven approach and away from the over-played “Look at THIS product” promotional tactic.
But there is also another form of outside help that is quickly establishing itself. Content marketing specialist firms have started to dominate the landscape and they are not showing signs of slowing down.
Finding the right partner to help you start and maintain a content strategy is probably the most important step in the process. When compared to the more traditional approach such as a display heavy program, a content-driven program can be viewed as fresh but also a little intimidating. Rebecca Lieb, founding partner and analyst at advisory firm Kaleido Insights, noted that in-house content studios are becoming an increasingly important part of business for many publishers. She also commented on the diminishing effect of all-about-me advertising, stating that the price of traditional display ads is “sinking, if not plummeting,” as content “gains traction over pure advertising.”
“It’s kind of a dogfight out there in terms of who creates content. It’s all kind of up for grabs out there and everybody wants a piece of that pie,” she added. “Publishers are uniquely positioned to create content on behalf of advertisers because they are, in fact, content creators,” while also able to leverage and repackage existing content to a built-in audience.
This creates a new faction of publishers who can and are changing how marketing is done. Publishers’ in-house content studios are differentiating themselves via unique data sets, reputation, production capacity and cultural cachet.
For example, the Washington Post’s BrandStudio has rapidly expanded. Paul Tsigrikes, VP of Marketing, estimates that while “75 percent or so” of such client revenue might have been spent on a traditional ad buy with 25 percent going to branded content, “in the last year and a half it’s almost reversed.”
Clients who are looking for outside help to start, continue, and execute their content marketing strategy need look no further than publishers who have all of the tools to aid in their transition. Armed with the data, audience, personnel and expertise, who is better equipped to act as YOUR in-house publisher than industry publishers themselves?
Image credit: "AlphaLab Fall 2017," AlphaLab Startup Accelerator © 2017, used under an Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/