Content marketing is king among brands in today’s connected world. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 72 percent of all business-to-business marketers focus on creating engaging content for potential customers, citing it as the top priority for internal content creators over the next year. By 2019, the content marketing industry is projected to reach $300 billion globally, and we are witnessing first-hand how content marketing strategies are now a part of most integrated marketing and public relations plans.
The emergence of content marketing is evident when you think about what it can do for a brand. Its reach can extend across various audiences and be more impactful than traditional forms of advertising. Companies and customers can interact and collaborate, allowing a brand to learn from its target audience to create new products or improve current services. And when a brand is able to seed content to the public, it creates an opportunity to educate, attract and create new customers, ultimately helping to ensure business goals are achieved.
But with any piece of content, ensuring that the right audience is able to view it is just as import as the messaging itself. There is no point in meticulously refining a byline designed to show industry thought leadership if nobody is able to see it. This reality is becoming a problem for many brands today: Because of the varying ways audiences get their news online – smartphone, tablets, desktops, laptops – marketing content needs to be developed and adapted to all communication channels and devices.
Crossing the Divide
One company leading the way in mobile content distribution and ensuring brands optimize content marketing is Zumobi. According to its website, “Zumobi enables marketers to more effectively distribute content like blogs, social media and videos across important mobile touch points, including apps, web and media.” Through the award winning Zumobi Brand Integration (Zbi) Platform, which was launched in 2012, marketers can increase the “discovery, engagement, activation and conversion [of potential customers] in their apps, mobile web and mobile media.” The platform also captures a host of consumer data that marketers can use to refine current or future marketing campaigns.
So what does this mean exactly? The company helps brands create “dynamic” experiences for audiences by leveraging their content in mobile-friendly formats. They can do this in a number of different ways, but what caught my attention is the company’s development of something called a “Microzine,” which as the name suggests is almost like a miniature magazine.
In a nutshell, a Zumobi Microzine pulls information and content from various online touchpoints including social media, videos, blogs and other web-based applications. Presented in an easy-to-read, mobile-friendly format, consumers can browse the content at their own pace and timing of their choosing, while marketers can update the content in real-time. But the really compelling thing about a Microzine is that it also features shoppable content. This means when a consumer is viewing a product on a Microzine, they can actually purchase it directly in the experience. Facebook actually announced a similar function recently where users can tap on platform video ads to buy the product.
“Since mobile overtook desktop, advertisers and brands are starting to think mobile first, and for them Microzines make perfect sense,” said Marla Schimke, vice president of marketing at Zumobi. “Microzines are great [for the brands] because they take content already developed and put it in front of a mobile audience. And for retailers, [Microzines] can be shoppable and become an additional revenue stream.”
Bag Borrow or Steal – an luxury online retailer – is one company utilizing Zumobi’s Microzine to increase sales and create enhanced mobile experiences for its customers. According to a March announcement, the Microzine pulls from Bag Borrow or Steal’s “blog, Twitter and Instagram feeds” to aggregate the content and offer “luxury bags and other items recommended to shoppers based on the individual’s interest.” This type of targeted, mobile-friendly programing is not only a way to improve ROI on marketing strategies, but also serves as a way to connect and reach new consumers with quality content.
Are Microzines and other interactive platforms the future of content marketing? Only the future will tell, but it looks like that is where the industry is trending. In the years ahead, marketers will need to create content that is more rich, interactive and analytics-driven to stand out from the crowd. A consumer’s interest in a simple article or blog is bound to wane in comparison to interactive and other creative content marketing strategies, and expect to see many new content marketing tools and technologies to leverage in the not so distant future.
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