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Five Key Takeaways From Our Annual Content Fitness Report That Will Drive Today's Modern Marketer

It’s that time of year at PAN - we’re releasing the results of our Content Fitness Report, complete with data that is rich with insights. The conversation starts around the necessity and the longevity of content marketing, but we took the analysis a little bit further.

To begin, we surveyed a group of top marketers across B2B and B2C industries regarding the “health” of their content marketing programs. Many reported that they felt meeting the demands of today’s customers is still a challenge, with only 72% of marketers feeling confident that their content is in line with the interests of their customers. What’s more alarming – nearly 30% of modern marketers are not leveraging their customers’ insights and behavior in order to deliver the right “smart” content in the right places, such as mobile. So what does this mean for today’s 21^st century marketer looking for ways to engage and grow their targeted audiences?

Here are the 5 key takeaways from the 2015 Content Fitness Report to consider as you build your next content campaign:

Yesterday, Brad Stone and Sarah Frier published a feature in Bloomberg Business based on an exclusive interview with Evan Spiegel, SnapChat’s co-founder and CEO, who notoriously shies away from press interviews. Kudos to them for great reporting, and for finding a way to broadly give us Spiegel’s perspectives, even on those topics he claimed were “off the f***ing record.”

The piece, Evan Spiegel Reveals Plan to Turn Snapchat Into a Real Business, tells the story of SnapChat’s growth and how Spiegel is a fiery young CEO with bright hopes for his startup’s future. But I’m left with a lot of questions throughout, as Spiegel claims to know what millennials want, even without studying data and trends that so many other publishers rely on in their attempts to give consumers the experience they supposedly want.

Image by Adam Przezdziek  used under CC license  https://www.flickr.com/photos/67683836@N02/

A lot of Spiegel’s plans for the future seem to rely on editorial content. SnapChat’s first attempt at this was Discover, where publishers such as CNN, People and National Geographic have signed on to share video editorial content. If I brought this up in my circle of millennial friends – who Spiegel is claiming to target – most of them wouldn’t even know what the Discover feature of SnapChat is. That doesn’t mean there isn’t potential, but nothing about Spiegel’s plans left me believing that SnapChat would make it into my morning news routine. Let those that are nailing the content game do that right now – like the Skimm, which has quickly made itself a part of many millennial morning routines with its quick and witty news bites from what’s happening around the world.

As many of you may know, for the past 12 years, I have been teaching at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications. Every year, I look forward to this time. I’m always curious to meet my new crop of students, hear what questions they will ask and discover what topics will pique their interest. As we kick-off a new year, I want to invite all of you along on this journey with a new blog series from myself, ‘Cuse Chronicles by a CEO, in which I’ll explore my experiences teaching at Syracuse this semester.

For the past four years, I’ve been teaching a capstone course to two sets of 20 graduating seniors with PR majors. This capstone course serves many purposes for students including helping them understand the business environment in which public relations operates and identifying how PR can add value to the organization.

As a search engine marketer, I often get asked how to generate content for SEO. Although SEO has evolved in the past 10 years, my answer has always remained the same – don’t generate content purely for SEO reasons! You should be generating content for your users first and foremost!

I know that sounds weird coming from someone in this industry. But here’s the thing...the search engines want to give users the best experience they can. If they don’t, those users will go to a competitor. Thus, the search engines are constantly coming out with algorithmic updates and data refreshes in an attempt to rid the results of those that don’t provide value to the users, i.e. websites that utilize spam tactics, thin content, or are just plain old irrelevant. If you have always been focused on providing value to your users, you have likely survived those updates and refreshes. If you have focused solely on the search engines and tried to game the system, you have seriously put yourself at risk of being penalized.

As any PR professional knows, prediction pieces are all the rage this time of year. Executives, industry experts and analysts are all reflecting on the past year and hypothesizing about what is ahead. The year’s biggest trends, the ones that fell by the way side and what will be the next big thing are all popular discussion points. The PR industry is no exception of the prediction piece. Similar to other industries, these insights help us PR folks identify what was considered a success and understand how the industry is doing as a whole. Last week, The Council of Public Relations released survey results that touched upon everything from the overall state of the PR industry in 2014 to the biggest opportunities and challenges that we will encounter in 2015. As I noted earlier this month in my video recap of PAN’s activity in Q3 – 2014 has been and continues to be a phenomenal year for PAN Communications. As excited as I am about the record year PAN is having, it made me happy to see that other PR agencies are experiencing the same sort of success. According to the results, 2014 will be another positive gain for the PR industry with the majority of PR Council firms stating that they are on their way to another year of revenue growth. Nearly two-thirds of participating firms (65 percent) are reporting that their top line is up, with the average growth for 2014 projected among all participating firms around 6 percent. The survey also identified five areas that will provide the biggest growth opportunities with clients in 2015. After reading through these five areas, it’s clear that a shift is coming for the PR industry. Here are the five areas that will provide the biggest growth opportunities in 2015: