Not mapping content? Then you are wasting your monies on content marketing

Imagine spending time, effort, and money to create a top-notch creative content, which falls flat when the consumer ignores it. Wouldn't it bother you? In fact, it is a marketer's worst nightmare if his or her content doesn't interest the consumer.

Shrutika Nagpal

Explaining it symbolically, Shrutika Nagpal, Creative Director, Scatter, said, "Think of it like building a relationship. If you land up on the first date and start talking about having kids, what are the chances you're going to meet again? Without mapping, you're having a conversation with no context. Or worse, the wrong context. Your customers don't feel acknowledged or understood, because you're telling them something they already know, or haven't even got to thinking about yet."

The solution to overcome this Achilles Heel is content mapping. It is the art of creating and distributing content to reach the right audience, converting them into prospective buyers, and creating content that keeps them interested.

Sapna Arora

Sapna Arora, Chief Marketing Officer, OLX, said, "Mapping enables businesses to take a data-driven approach to engaging customers. Unlike a couple of years ago, when digital penetration was at a nascent stage, mapping today is extremely analytics and data-heavy, allowing businesses to tweak their content marketing strategies to deliver optimal results. A crucial element in this is guiding consumers through a purchase funnel, especially if you look at e-commerce platforms where the cart abandonment rate on an average is 70% plus. If brands can leverage content and data to address this challenge effectively, then they can substantially improve their business results."

She said it makes monetary sense for many businesses to micro-target, since acquisition cost is high and consumer fickleness is higher. "Targeting and messaging that is very precise and contextual helps improve conversions and hence lowers acquisition cost. In many cases, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the cohort size for a particular piece of communication is 1!"

Prashanth Challapalli

While almost every brand in India has tested the content marketing waters, content mapping is still fairly unused terminology. "I doubt a majority of the brands are mapping content. I am yet to see a well-planned content strategy. I see a lot of topical posts, but apart from born-digital brands like Zomato, Netflix, Swiggy, etc., a lot of brands haven't yet figured out a content strategy map, said Prashanth Challapalli, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Gravity Integrated.

Kumar Deb Sinha

Kumar Deb Sinha, Revenue Head, Editorji, said it is easy to believe and question the rationale of spending money behind content mapping a customer journey. He said, "It is not an easy task to get customers to follow this brand purchase cycle and consume content as the marketers have planned. Most probably, customers will consume content in one of the stages only or at max a few more stages. And that is exactly why such content mapping is not a prevalent practice."

Some new-age categories such as food delivery and ecommerce have mastered the art of content mapping, but there is a long way to go for traditional mass-market businesses such as FMCG and retail. Categories such as auto, travel and tourism and financial products have started seeing the advantage of content mapping and have evolved accordingly.

Gaurav Mehta

Gaurav Mehta, Chief Marketing Officer, GirnarSoft (parent company of Cardekho, Gaadi.com, Zigwheels, Bikedekho and Powerdrift) told BuzzInContent that in high-involvement purchase categories with long consumer journeys such as automobiles, insurance and B2B, marketers will always give utmost importance to content mapping because a large part of that sector is driven by content.

He added, "Earlier, a larger section of categories with low consumer involvement like FMCG and apparel were not very curious about what content can do for them. Even for them, content mapping is going to become more and more important due to digitisation that has made people in the habit of asking questions and digging out more information before they make a consumption. A lot of consumption happening is conscious consumption."

One can segregate the consumer journey in several stages according to the nature of the brand category, but generally, it is divided into three stages. First is awareness, second is consideration and third, the decision-making stage.

There's potential for a lot of brands to be mapping content a lot better. Therefore, one question must be building up in the readers' minds now — 'Is there a right way to map content?'

Snehil Gautam

Snehil Gautam, Head of Marketing and Growth at Housing.com, Makaan.com and Proptiger.com, said, "A brand's objective is to acquire consumers, keep engaging and adding value to the consumer till the time transaction happens. Once the transaction is over, the companies try to engage with the same user to cross-sell or upsell some other product. It's essential to understand at which level is the user in his or her buying journey and then recommend the right content as per the phase of the buying journey. If you don't do it, then there is a chance of losing the customer to your competition."

It is easier for online brands to map content, but how can an offline brand up its game on the content mapping front?

Gautam answered, "In this case, brand play is more. You should know where your core customers are going and then follow them through brand presence through some activity and brand content partnerships. There are a few who have started content platforms. For example, Wakefit's Qawwali video on its newly formed content platform Home Time on YouTube. While it is a B2C company and has an online presence, it has an offline product. The future of all online products is that they will embrace the online platforms and slowly and gradually have to build content on their platform to address the users."

Pointing fingers at one very big mistake that content marketers make while mapping content looking at social content and performance creative in silos, Challapalli said, "Regular social content is hardly boosted. If you pay as much attention to social content as brands do to performance creative and look at your targeting metrics and spend a little money on regular content, you will see far more effectiveness and lesser performance costs. This has been proved globally. Only spending on performance and ignoring brand is very prevalent and unfortunately will cost brands a lot in the long run."

Another important aspect of content mapping is delivery and distribution of content. Mehta of GirnarSoft said, "Sometimes people ignore the fact that while creating content is important, distribution is extremely critical. If this is not there, then you will never have a proper content strategy of delivering content phase-wise."

Nagpal of Scatter concluded, "Mapping content according to the customer's journey is the key to making content a strategic asset with measurable ROI. If a customer is at the cusp of choosing your product, and you provide content that decisively demonstrates its USPs, you make a sale, instantly, because you've said the right thing at the right time. And if you use the right tools to add 'right place' to that formula, you strike gold. Targeting gold. But without mapping, you're essentially doing content for content's sake."