One of the great marketing con jobs of our time is “content marketing” promoted by the same people who inflated the social media bubble. Last week, a marketing analytics firm called Beckon reported some statistics about content that should sober up even the most delusional content maniac:
– 19 of 20 pieces of content (95%) get little to no engagement.
According to the Type A Group “because of the amount of time, energy and man hours it takes to produce this stuff, non- working dollars (the cost of production) among Beckon’s clients (Coca-Cola, Gap, Microsoft, HP, StubHub, Reebok, Converse, NBC Universal) was up 50% last year. One marketer actually produced 50,000 pieces of content. If my math is right, that’s 137 a 
day — including Christmas.
– 90% of engagement is lavished on 5% of content. (Mostly, I’ll bet, on content from brands that have spent billions on traditional advertising to make themselves successful.)
– The amount of this crap produced by brands tripled last year. Did someone say lemmings?
Like social media marketing, content marketing is founded on the delusion that consumers are in love with brands and want to “join the conversation” about brands and hear “branded storytelling.”Not in this lifetime.”
The idea that if you produce content your audience is going to flock to it is pure bullshit. These ideas are spread from the self important social media experts who all told us that we “have to be on social media to engage consumers”. Now that the social media marketing ship is sinking they are trying to get us to buy new tickets to the “content ship”.
Unfortunately, due to the election, the amount of bad/phoney content is increasing, especially in social media, and the public is falling for it, hook, like and sinker. Brands would do better to concentrate on online marketing that actually drives brand objectives, not trying to tell a story that nobody will read.
