Crystal Clear Communications Blog

How can content marketing create awareness? What else can content do?

Creating brand awareness is the #1 goal that marketers successfully achieve with content marketing. About four out of five marketers create brand awareness successfully with content marketing, say Content Marketing Institute surveys.

B2C marketers build awareness with content

More than half of B2C marketers use content marketing not only to build awareness, but also to successfully meet additional needs:

• Build credibility and trust.
• Educate audiences.
• Build loyalty with existing customers.
• Generate demand, leads, sales, and revenue. 

B2B marketers build awareness and more

B2B marketers report similar experiences with content marketing. 

Going beyond awareness-building, more than half of B2B marketers also use content marketing to sucessfully:

• Build credibility and trust.
• Educate audiences.
• Build loyalty with existing customers.
• Generate demand and leads.
• Nurture subscribers, audiences and leads.

B2C marketers’ #1 content pain point is attribution

When marketers need to measure revenue from content marketing vs. other marketing activities, they run into a problem called attribution. 

In fact, this is the number one frustration for B2C marketers.

It’s tricky to get attribution right. Here’s a blog on how you can minimize attribution error.

B2B marketers’ #1 content pain point is the lack of organizational fit

For B2B marketers, the #1 pain point is organizational fit. You’ve probably felt the symptoms:

• Marketers don’t get the support they need from subject matter experts (SMEs), sales, and executives.
• Content is no one’s full time job, just a side gig for a lot of people who don’t feel responsible for content.
• There’s a lack of agreement on the content marketing mission, strategy, and message.

That’s why I encourage B2B marketers to start up content marketing by building an internal content community under a big tent — a place where it’s safe to co-create your content marketing mission, strategy, and message together.

Co-creation of these key deliverables leads to the Ikea effect: the feeling that your mission, strategy, and message are more valuable because your team put it together themselves. The Ikea effect means you’ve achieved deep buy-in, so your review processes get quicker and easier.

To prove in content marketing, perform a pilot project:

• Define clear market boundaries.
• Choose a greenfield or brownfield market to apply content marketing only – no other marketing activities allowed during the pilot project. 
• Measure the sales lift. 
• Calculate return on marketing investment (ROMI). 

Great content helps buyers at every step

Content marketing drives awareness and consideration – and much more throughout the buyer’s journey. That’s especially important on a big-ticket purchase, which is usually a carefully considered purchase. 

When buyers make a carefully considered purchase, content must get four jobs done for them. The accompanying infographic shows how to apply content marketing for carefully considered purchases – cars, homes, colleges, retirement plans, and capital expenditures.

“How to measure consideration and awareness contribution of content marketing?” is one of marketers’ Top 100 Questions about Content Marketing.