When I was working in the content marketing industry nearly a decade ago, audience time spent with the marketing was a huge focal point, and a big part of the sales pitch.
"Why spend mere seconds with the brand through digital advertising when you can have minutes of their time through content marketing?"
Similar versions of the same narrative have developed with community building, thought leadership on social, and now with hyper-exclusive events that are all about the conversation without any of the sell.
There are two really big problems with too much focus on this, though, in my opinion.
First, depth of engagement has a point of diminishing returns. Of course, there's a minimum threshold that advertising needs to cross to create any kind of real memory traces, but is it really better to spend 2 days with 200 people than it is to spend 10 seconds with 10,000?
From a probability point of view, and with things like the 95:5 rule holding true, a big bet on a small sample is very risky, especially if it's an audience where you have no idea if they're all coming in-market anytime soon.
And the other problem is how that depth of engagement is using its time.
If all that time is talking around what you, or only speaking about the broad industry you serve, without ever really touching on your offering and the situations to consider you, then it's potentially a very indirect way of trying to create consideration.
So many content guides and content strategies are only loosely connected to the category, hoping that the value of the insights delivered will leads people to seek you out and find out what you actually do.
The trouble is people are largely unlikely to do that work, so you end up with a very inefficient comms strategy.
In many cases, a good 15 second ad spot delivered to a large audience who doesn't know you would do better than 15 minutes spent with content that never says what you do.
Big and expense brand bets in marketing should be making sure that they're reaching as many people as possible and many of them are not, from what I see.
It's not to say these strategies don't have real value, but often that value is about keeping the brand top of mind maintaining broad awareness that you've developed.
If you're not reaching new people and as much of the audience as you can, you might be just talking deeply to the same group who knows you and gradually losing visibility in the market.
I've seen enough real examples in search data to know that it's happening to some already.
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