Content Marketing Heading for Collapse?

graphic courtesy of SHIFT Communications

The first full work week in 2014 opened with a spirited debate about the future of content marketing. It began with a post from Mark Schaefer that posits content marketing will soon hit a saturation point he calls content shock, beyond which it won’t be a sustainable activity for many businesses.

Christopher Penn at SHIFT Communications echoed and amplified Schaefer’s points, adding that the coming surfeit of content will make earned media critical unless you have already secured a large and loyal following. It’s an interesting and somewhat contrarian position to take when traditional media companies are still struggling to find an online business model to replace print advertising.

After reading these pieces I was again struck by the difference between B2B and B2C. My clients aren’t facing (at least not yet) a flood of quality content in their market niches. So content shock for certain verticals isn’t an immediate concern. I also don’t think too much emphasis should be placed on traditional media outreach/earned media efforts. In fact, many of my B2B clients achieve earned media success when trade magazines reprint our owned content.

I’ve also found that once clients experience success with high quality content they own and publish, they are not anxious to return to communicating through a media filter. Finally, I don’t think any discussion of content marketing is complete with addressing how it is integrated into the sales automation and funnel process of the client. It’s not a numbers game re viewership, it’s quality over quantity. If you can quantify that your content is touching prospects and moving them through the sales cycle, the program is successful no matter what competitors are publishing.

Not only did Chris Penn thoughtfully reply to my comment, he highlighted part of it in a followup piece clarifying some points. The content marketing saturation point won’t remove the need for companies to conduct content marketing. But as the graph above shows, it greatly increases the requirement that content be truly exceptional:

This is the nuance of the content shock: we have practical limits on what we can give our attention to, and our universe of content is actually great. The amount of content we need to consume on a daily basis that we don’t like has diminished significantly as choice has expanded, which means that for any company looking to invade that individual media mix, they MUST be as great or greater than what’s already in there. There is less bad or mediocre content left to squeeze out of a zero sum attention budget.

The only way you can do so is to create spectacular, top-notch content, and that’s where it becomes un-economical for many brands. The exception is this: if you provide something that your audience deeply wants that they can’t get elsewhere. Kevin Kelly’s prophecy of a thousand true fans is being fulfilled. We will have our loyal audiences, to whom everything we produce for them fits in the great content category. We will have some content audiences to whom a fair amount of what we produce is good enough for them. We will lack the audiences to whom we have no appeal – and as long as our businesses do not rely on them, we’ll be okay.

That’s a point I agree with strongly. My only caveat is that superior content need not become prohibitively expense if organizations truly adopt the mindset of a publisher and talk to addressing customer needs, rather than about themselves and their services.

What about you? Do you think content marketing is heading for collapse, or a shakeout in which only the top performers survive? Let’s all stay tuned, and keep executing.