Recently, there has been a trend of brands being encouraged to think of themselves as media outlets in their own right.     For example, earlier in the month AdAge published a feature “All brands are publishers”

Many brands and organisations seem to agree.   In these recessionary times, content marketing is one area where money is being spent and its worth looking at a range of research that has been released over the past month to support that fact:

• Slideshare and Columnfive media released an infographic on the power of content marketing (snippet above).  This includes the statistic that marketers are spending a quarter of their budgets on content marketing and 71% of b2b companies are doing more content marketing than last year

• According to IDG, content marketing, which IDG defines as “white papers, case studies, videos, custom websites, video and white papers”, is one of tech marketers top five spending priorities for 2011

• These stats are echoed by the (US) Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.   Nine out of ten b2b marketers are using content marketing, which includes article posting (79%), social media (excluding blogs) (74%), blogs (65%), emailed newsletters (63%), and case studies (58%)

• Another US study, this time from the Custom Content Council (which obviously has a vested interest in the results), shows that 72% of marketers think branded content is more effective than advertising in a magazine, 62% say it is more effective than advertising and 69% say it is ‘superior’ to direct mail and PR

If money is being funnelled into content creation, what are the perceived benefits?    The Content Marketing Institute says it is brand awareness (69%), customer acquisition (68%) and lead generation (67%).

Added to that is of course the effect that a content campaign can have on your search results and traffic.   I’ve written before about the case study of tech company Centerbeam, which created a newsroom and got it listed on Google News, resulting in a 152% increase in landing traffic .

Of course, creating content is the easy bit.

Creating content that is both interesting to your target audience and avoids ramming brand messages down their throats is trickier, and examples such as these 15 best practice corporate blogs featured in Mashable last year, are worth a look for any marketer operating in this area.

Related articles

• 42 Content Marketing Commandments | Content Marketing Institute (affiliatestartingline.com)
• Content Marketing Examples from Home Depot (converstations.com)
• 32% of Businesses Cite ‘Lack of Time’ as Biggest Social Media Challenge (prweb.com)
• How to Jump on the Content Marketing Bandwagon [Infographic] (mpdailyfix.com)
• Proof that online content creation works (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)

What’s the justification for putting budget behind on-site online content?  How about a 152% increase in landing traffic.

That’s the headline figure from a post in the Marketing Sherpa blog by David Kirkpatrick

David’s post lists a case study from centerbeam, a ‘technology infrastructure company’ – basically a b2b IT business.  centerbeam used to use tele and email sales as well as a pay per click search programme.   The latter wasn’t working so money was put into content marketing instead.

An outside supplier was contracted to create 50 articles on the site per month, the content had to be exclusive to the centerbeam site, it was keyword optimised and broken into six topics.

The content isn’t simply SEO fodder, a look at the centerbeam news page displays the type of headings that someone interested in (say) Cloud Computing would be interested in.  In other words, there is a focus on quality as well as quantity and stuffing copy with keywords.

The results?

First of all centerbeam successfully applied to be listed within Google News, if someone did search for Cloud Computing or Green IT they might come across a CenterBeam piece.   I’d think primarily as a result of that, visitors from non paid search is up 43%, google search performance is up 56% and news landing page traffic is up 152%.

Two observations though.  First of all in the nicest way possible, the site design isn’t great and the content doesn’t link through to other areas that might give me more information and cause me to stay.

Secondly , there is no obvious button to share the content they’ve spent money creating.   Content + Search is a good approach.   Content + Social + Search is better.

Related articles

• Optimize Your Blog with Keyword Rich Content and Increase Your Business (howtospoter.com)
• Niche Site Challenge #3 – Content Creation & Organization (pointblankseo.com)
• 2 Take-Aways from a MarketingSherpa Case Study (fearlesscompetitor.net)

Following Rupert Murdoch‘s comment that he might in future hide his news sites from Google, there’s obviously been a fair amount of discussion about it.  Ben Kunz’s take on the issue, including a look at how Sony manages to give away free content AND shift inventory is worth a read.

However, the obvious question is, could this become something of an own goal? Answers from Hitwise and Alexa say quite possibly yes.

Hitwise looked at Murdoch’s flagship US title, The Wall Street Journal, and found that both Google and Google News are the top traffic drivers.  More importantly, Google is responsible for driving new readers Murdoch’s way – with over 44% of Google traffic coming from people who haven’t visited the WSJ in the past 30 days.

That last point is important – with 88% of newspaper reading time happening in print (note – reading time, not actual readers), the way we consume online media is, outside a community of news nerds, such as myself, very different.

The other month, UK media blogger Malcolm Coles looked at the online editions of the UK national newspapers and found that over 6/10 readers only read a single page, or article, and leave again. The conclusion is that there is less brand loyalty online for news.  We search for what we look for, we consume it, and we quickly move onto doing something else.  And if we encounter a paywall, we can easily find that content for free somewhere else.

The Wall Street Journal at least does have a core of – paying – readers.  Looking at the UK tabloid, The Sun, Google is responsible for close to 20% of ‘upstream’ visits to the site according to Alexa. For The Times (see image below), that figure increases to over a quarter.

Given this much more single-minded way we now consume news, it will be interesting to see how Murdoch’s sites fare if he does pull them away from search. From the evidence, if he really goes ahead with it, he might have to do an about turn very quickly.

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• Google: Rupert Murdoch can block us if he wants to (telegraph.co.uk)
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• If The WSJ.com Says Goodbye To Google, It Will Also Say Goodbye To 25 Percent Of Its Traffic (techcrunch.com)