Technology Will Be Applied to Content Curation in 2012

Curata on Content Curation (Mar 6 2012) Marketing

1. After interviewing some 200 brand marketers and executives from 10 agencies that work with business-to-business clients, Jeff Ernst, Forrester Research analyst concludes that marketing automation and analytics and content marketing will be big trends in 2012.
   
   You might argue that analytics, automation and content marketing are related. Every major investment in marketing has to be justified in terms of sales, at the end of the day. Analytics are a primary tool for assessing such effectiveness.
   
   Curated content, and content marketing, will not ultimately be exceptions. Thought leadership clearly is a reason to do content marketing and content curation. But even successful thought leadership programs will have to show how they relate to sales and revenue.
   
   Automation is related to content curation because the task of identifying, evaluating and publishing curated content quickly becomes burdensome without use of automation tools.
   
   For some, those developments will come as no surprise. The requirement to justify marketing spend by demonstrating return on investment is simply a requirement for B2B marketing executives. Hence the heightened emphasis on analytics.
   
   But Ernst also says sales automation tools will be a big emphasis as well, at least in part because the effectiveness of cold calling, email blasts and other outbound marketing activities arguably has declined.
   
   “Our surveys show that 19 percent of B2B organizations are planning to implement marketing automation in 2012, and another 17 percent are expanding their usage,” said Ernst. That might include 20 percent of manufacturers, 20 percent of financial services firms, and 18 percent of business and professional services firms surveyed by Forrester Research.
   
   Gartner analyst Laura McLellan has predicted that by 2017, chief marketing officers will spend more on information technology than the chief information officers.
   
   In 2011 B2B and B2C marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue were almost three times as high (10 percent) as IT budgets (3.6 percent), according to Gartner.
   
   Gartner also said 2012 IT budgets are expected to grow 4.7 percent, while all marketing budgets, in general, are predicted to grow nine percent, and high tech marketing budgets, more specifically, are expected to increase 11 percent.
   
   “Thought leadership” also will become the “core marketing platform,” Ernst said. As political campaigns focus on a few key themes, so content marketers will take a more structured and sustained approach to content marketing. As the developing adage suggests, “marketers will act more like publishers.”
   
   If thought leadership does become the core of a marketing program, content curation also is likely to become a common practice. That is going to mean more investment in automation.
   
   Just as surely, resource allocators will demand some evidence that thought leadership programs contribute to business success.

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