Page 17 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

The rapid perpetuation of mobile devices put a rocket behind content
consumption once again because now we could consume our favorite pictures of
Grumpy Cat, movie reviews, and YouTube videos from a train, a store, even in
the middle of a cornfield if the mood struck.

Because of the mobile revolution, by 2014 the amount of content consumed
had been propelled upward by another two full hours a day. Today, adults in the
Western World consume content an average of 10 hours a day!

There is no person reading this book, and no person you have ever known,
who has lived in a world where the amount of content consumed is not going up.
How much higher can it go? 11 hours per day? 13? 14?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. Some gamers already consume content 18
hours a day or more in one sitting. Is that our future? Sleep, consume, sleep,
consume? The point is, we’re approaching a physiological limit to content
consumption.

This intersection of finite content consumption and the explosion of content
availability is creating a marketing industry tremor I characterize as Content
Shock.2In a scenario in which content supply is exponentially increasing while
content demand remains flat, you have to work a lot harder just to preserve the
same amount of “mindshare” you have with your customers today. And that
scenario is exactly what is happening.

The evaporation of content marketing as we know it

Here’s an example of what many businesses are experiencing in the Content
Shock age. A mid-sized sporting goods company in America’s Pacific
Northwest had carved out a small, profitable niche and served an international
group of customers, by following a classic social media marketing playbook:

They were consistently creating a variety of helpful, high quality content
pieces, many of them featuring customer stories.
They reached out to popular athletes using their products and featured their
adventures, stories, and videos.
They actively engaged with their audience on Twitter, YouTube, and
Facebook and had at least doubled their online audience for three
consecutive years.
They had invested in more content creation every year and had even hired
their first full-time community manager, an extraordinary commitment for
the small company with just 17 employees.