What keeps a CEO up at night?

Put simply, their competitors. I imagine the art of war brings some very sleepless nights.

Let’s however not shy away from the topic that marketing is a key component of a business strategy. The speed in which a business can activate their marketing is what makes that business powerful.

More than ever though brands and marketers are faced with enormous complexity, and an overwhelming breadth of marketing channels to invest in. When you couple this with a limited ‘specialist’ knowledge on which channels can help to solve their business challenges, how can one truly ever stay ahead? What used to be a simple business of buying a 30-second television spot or pages in newspapers has now become a complex myriad of channels. Furthermore, the need for partners to offer services and skills in order to help brands navigate this challenge continues to be of great significance.

One area that marketers have begun to see their marketing spend payback is branded content. Nothing new there right? Yet when it comes to content marketing, whilst not an entirely new form of marketing, it does now come with its nuances, of which there are many. The mobilisation of content marketing has quickly become more complex, more time consuming, more specialist. Why? Because its power lies in how well you integrate one dot with another, creating a seamless consumer journey.

Leading Advertisers such as Netflix, Vodafone and Danone have done just that - investing the time and resource into agency partners that understand how to analyse data in order to create relevant and consistent content that not only retain but attract new audiences, ultimately creating ambassadors for their brands.

And with marketers now looking to implement content marketing as business as usual as opposed to campaign specific activity, it’s essential the industry continues to provide the tools and services that can help brands to navigate this challenging landscape. A landscape which, again, has changed dramatically over the last 10 years, and continues to shift at an unprecedented rate.

Encouragingly and not surprisingly, in a study conducted by Content Marketing Institute, Content Marketing in the UK 2017: Budgets, Benchmarks and Trends – 87% of marketers were using content marketing within their organisation.

And as a generation that are blind to ads and consuming media on-the-go, storytelling through data-led content is fast becoming the best way for brands to cut through. Look no further than some modern day household heroes. From Airbnb and their approach of making the customer the brand, to Go Pro and its diverse content from kayaking in New Zealand to ostrich racing in South Africa, which literally allows their consumers to turn the camera on their lives and showcase their adventures. Brands need to follow suit and be smarter, more authentic and more committed to giving or facilitating better consumer experiences.

No longer does a media plan have a predictable set of channels and partners. So when defending your business against competitors in the battle ground, customer journey planning, led by data insights, is something you’ll need to consider building into your arsenal if you stand any chance of retaining and growing your market share.

The writing's on the wall, consumers don’t want to be interrupted, and the data that we as marketers spend so much time collecting shows they fundamentally dislike ads. So we need to pay more attention, and invest the time to understand these insights properly in order to provide value and start to become what they’re interested in with content - especially if we want to win the war for attention.

We need to move away from interruptive marketing and start to educate and entertain. It sounds simple, and we’re all doing this, or are we? The reality is that some brands better than others. It’s time we became brave and bold with our thinking. We need more advertisers and marketers like Netflix, Vodafone and Airbnb who recognise the value of their customer data, to come to the forefront and lead by example.

At MEC Wavemaker, we answer this challenge for clients by bringing specialists together across multiple disciplines from Partnerships and Sponsorships through to Data and Insights, Content Marketing, Organic Performance and Digital Engagement.

Emmy Winning Content Producer, David Beebe recently reminded me of some wise words Kevin Spacey passed on when speaking at Content Marketing World;

“Audiences have spoken. They want stories. They’re dying for them. They’re rooting for us to give them the right thing. And they will talk about it, binge on it. Tweet, blog, Facebook about it and engage with it with a passion and intimacy that a blockbuster movie can only dream of. And all we have to do is give it to them.”