How to Break Through the Content Marketing Clutter

Today, many marketers want to know how to get their message through the clutter? The world is filled with so many messages, making your brand stand out is no easy task.  Every marketer is fighting for some attention from consumers.  The trouble, people are now besieged with devices from smartphones to tablets to laptops where ads, commentaries, videos and so much more are being broadcasted out on every sort of medium at seemingly every part of the day.

Whether you are choosing blog marketing or trying to solve for more complex content marketing puzzles, trying to find the niche, the tone, the sparkle to get the attention – is an increasingly difficult task.

According to BrightEdge, “Marketers today are creating more content than ever. In fact, 77 percent of marketers plan to increase content production this year (Source: LinkedIn).”  BrightEdge, one of the  leading content performance marketing platforms, is using what they term is called a DataCube.  This DataCube comprises mountains of data from web-oriented content and analyzes the content to ascertain performance – which in this case has to do with engagement.

So, what does that mean?  BrightEdge says that engagement differs among industries, verticals, “B2Cs” or B2Bs” and other factors.  For instance, BrightEdge found that consumers only engage with 20 percent of “marketing” content on average. For B2B, the average engagement is at 50 percent.

BrightEdge states:  “Engagement rates vary across specific industries, but hover between 33 and 50 percent of content overall.”

One way to stand out in an increasingly competitive marketing environment is by integrating video and images into your content.  For example, PikWizard has a library of over 1 million free stock photos, videos, and royalty-free images to help elevate your content marketing.

There are various other websites available for free images. However, it’s possible that you might end up using an image from a free photo website that doesn’t belong to the verified owner.  If you want to be 100% legally safe, check out this list of cheap photo subscriptions by StockPhotoSecrets where you can get high-quality images, videos, and vector files. The stock agencies are also backed with proper licensing so you can safely use the images in commercial activity, without worrying about legal problems.

Engagement varies mainly by industry.  BrightEdge says hospitality, by its very nature, has a high level of engagement, “…because their content is so targeted. Much of their digital content is produced to fill specific, physical hotel rooms,” notes BrightEdge.  On the other side of engagement is retail.  BrightEdge argues that “…retail companies produce a massive amount of content …their product list and customer base is generally broad, and … their overall average engagement rate is inevitably lower.”

Given that issue, many predictive analytics and big data companies have started to develop solutions to make online shopping more personalized in order to up-level the engagement.

Manufacturing has a rather high score when it came to engagement.  This is usually because manufacturers tend to work with a niche brand of distributors and customers – only engaging with a few major distributors versus thousands or millions of customers.

BrightEdge also looked at engagement through the lens of laptop versus mobile.  While mobile might seem like the clear winner in terms of engagement factors – it turns out mobile’s engagement scores were low.  This could be that people use mobile devices for very quick purchases – especially since they use the devices on the go.

“The disparity between desktop and mobile engagement underlines a massive opportunity for marketers to improve the quality of their mobile content,” said BrightEdge.