Young Frankencontent

• Jan 12th, 2017
• content marketing

“Let me out! Let me out of here!  Get me the hell out of here! What’s the matter with you people? I was joking! Don’t you know a joke when you hear one? HA-HA-HA-HA. Jesus Christ, get me out of here! Open this goddamn door or I’ll kick your rotten heads in! Mommy!” – Dr. Frederick Frankenstein

The panicked doctor wasn’t referring to 21^st century marketing communications. But he could have been. Because in the name of “content marketing,” today’s companies have created a monster. Marketing content has exploded into a dizzying number of forms. All made possible by the no-cost miracle of digital distribution. And all leaving the poor, confused consumer to try to make sense of the morass.

First came the websites. Followed by the blogs and white papers and email campaigns. Then the social media scourge emerged, adding tweets and LinkedIn posts and Facebook and Instagram pages to the mix.

Undoubtedly realizing that customers were being overwhelmed with copy content, marketers began converting text into visuals. The past 24 months or so have been dominated by infographics and video — oh, and ready or not, here comes virtual reality — adding still more tactics to the unwieldy and expanding list of content types that consumers are expected to digest.

The result is Frankencontent — a content marketing strategy that’s a whole lot heavier on content than on marketing strategy.

Fortunately, there’s a way out. Here’s a two-word phrase to consider: “sales enablement.” In short, it’s about streamlining the preponderance of content tactics, and developing a more structured, more logical, more incisive set of content marketing tools for use by the sales team.

This post is getting a little longish for my taste, so let me leave it at this: If you feel like your current content marketing efforts are, shall we say, Abby Normal, do a little digging into sales enablement. Perhaps you’ll experience the content marketing equivalent of Elizabethan rapture: