Every year content marketing has been growing in popularity and acceptance to the point where it’s now a considered a staple of modern marketing. But as so many organizations have jumped on the content marketing bandwagon, it’s also become increasing difficult to cut through all the noise and to get your content seen by your target audience.
What are marketers to do these days if they want their content to actually make an impact on their business? We recently spoke to Vincent Mifsud, CEO of ScribbleLive, to get his take on the content marketing conundrum — and to see how his application marries math and marketing to give marketers an strategic advantage over their competitors.
Social Media Explorer (SME): What is ScribbleLive and what marketing need does it address?
Vincent Mifsud: ScribbleLive is a pure B2B Software as a Service (SAAS) application. ScribbleLive caters to mid and large sized companies within the marketing technology landscape. From a business perspective, we help marketers use a different approach to grow and attract an audience to their business.
The approach we promote is around the crafting and distributing of great content as the mechanism to do that, as opposed to the more traditional interruption-based strategies like ads.
SME: Why isn’t content enough – why do marketers need content marketing software?
Vincent: We believe a content marketing platform must help you as a marketer in a very holistic way. The framework we use is based on a content lifecycle. A proper content marketing platform will help you plan your content strategy, enable you to create content in many different ways, distribute that content to the appropriate channels, and provide you the means to measure your results.
ScribbleLive can help you create and curtate content in the context of a buyer journey you’re attempting to influence. We also have a freelance network of 1400 visual content creators that can help you create custom content on demand. We tie into your website, your mobile app, your digital and social channels to help you distribute the content. Then, we use data science and math to help you know what’s working and what’s not working, and where there are opportunities in terms of themes and topics that will resonate well with your audience.
We are big believers in the intersection of math and creativity. We believe the more objectively valuable recommendations we can give you that are numerically determined, the more effective you can be in your content marketing.
SME: Is the platform proactive?
Vincent: Yes. Based on your target market it’ll give you themes, topics, influencers, and recommendations around organic search and how that content can be found on Google. It processes what that would require and it provides those recommendations to you.
SME: ScribbleLive has a number of available features. Do users access them all at the same time?
Vincent: Modules can be purchased individually based on your pain points. We make it flexible for the buyer because everyone is at different points of their content maturity, so we allow you to start at different points and evolve to different solutions over time.
SME: Who is the ideal user of ScribbleLive?
Vincent: Definitely mid-size to large companies. Most clients will already have been involved in content marketing and have already decided that content is important.
Who in the organization would be the one throwing the switches, so to speak?
Vincent: Sometimes it’s the head of the content marketing department. Other times it’s the head of social or digital. Companies vary a lot but in terms of title, it’s usually the VP of Digital, VP of Content or VP of Social.
SME: In 2014, Mark Schaefer wrote about “Content Shock” — the point when so much content is being created that it will be almost impossible for most organizations to cut through and get their content seen. How does ScribbleLive address this?
Vincent: Quality over quantity. Generally, the more targeted your content is, and the more it speaks to your client, the better. The more generic the content, the more likely it is to get lost to Content Shock. ScribbleLive is as narrow and pertinent as possible with its content recommendations. But we also believe you have to put all content in the context of strategy — of the buyer, the journey.
SME: You’ve recently acquired the enterprise SEO platform, Linkdex. What does this offer ScribbleLive clients?
Vincent: In a word, data. Linkdex has some impressive technology regarding the recommendation engine around organic search — one the most massive sources of audience for content marketers. It’s a great addition to our suite of offerings.
SME: What do you see just over the horizon for content marketing in 2017?
Vincent: It’s becoming very complicated to be a marketer. It’s expensive to create quality content and harder than ever to figure things out. It’s hard to acquire and keep an audience and it’s only growing in complexity with the expansion of digital channels, the widening competitive landscape and so on. Our view is you have to help marketers become more calculated and less “guestimated.”
So, we see more math, more measurement and accountability in content marketing — and much less guesswork.
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