Ten facts about content marketing

Abstract

Content marketing is facing what most trendy topics face: it is more publicly discussed than it is truly understood. Thus far content production has relied on case-specific, individual reports, and the final outcomes of content have provided surprises, both positive or negative. In hindsight it is easy to explain content success and failure, but academic studies on the logic of content creation and content life cycle have been missing. The ambitious goal of this research, Opening the Black Box of Content Marketing, funded by Business Finland, has been to systematically open up the logic of content marketing. In our project, we asked what constitutes content related expectations, how are content experiences formed, and how the content lives in the consumer’s environment. In this report, we present ten facts about content marketing answering these questions. Since the start of this research project in November 2016, we have studied and analysed over a hundred pieces of content marketing – texts, images, videos and audio. We have interviewed over 20 content marketing specialists and gathered survey results from over 2,000 content marketing audience members. All the quotes on the following pages emerged from the interview transcripts and the open-ended questions’ answers from the Black Box project’s data pool. With the results, we want to encourage content marketing towards a new, more science- based path. As discussed at the Marketing Week in 2017 and PING Festival 2018 in Helsinki, we explain how audience is taking over the previous “kingdom of content”, and the final content experience is formed in collaboration. Cooperation has been central also for this research project. We want to thank both our Finnish and foreign university partners (researchers at the universities of Jyväskylä, Tampere, and Oklahoma and Macquarie University) and our corporate partners, those eager to develop their content: Alko, A-lehdet, Aamulehti, DNA, Fazer, Nordea, Pirkanmaan Lehtitalo, Vapa Media and PING Helsinki. Warm thanks also to all our interviewees and to those who participated in our surveys. In fact, content marketing follows more the rules of communication than marketing, and content can only be understood through understanding how that collaboration occurs in practice.