3 Ways Content Management Changes Marketing

Last week I mentioned the danger to companies that disregard trends in the content management space. I'm going horizontal this time and taking a crack at one of my favorites lines of business -- marketing.The top three ways content management is changing marketing:

3: Killing direct mail. I learned years ago that a successful direct mail marketing campaign has a 2% response rate. That would mean that 98% of the papers cluttering our mailboxes are meant to be unused. Whether we consider this a junk mail issue, a snail-mail spam issue, or a green issue, does anyone really need to incur the costs associated with stacks of unread fliers anymore? Deliver your content over a more targeted electronic medium, and maybe you'll have the added benefit of also annoying fewer potential customers.

2: Improving measurement and analytics. People get Ph.D.s studying and trying to generate ROI models for marketing. It's difficult, if not impossible, to tie back exact dollar amounts to individual marketing campaigns. That said, many of the newer ways to deliver content to target markets allow for immediate and measurable responses. If you have the right content analytics in place to track clickstreams and other behaviors, marketing programs can be tracked immediately, something that helps marketers re-tool strategies in almost real time.

1: Marrying IT and marketing. Marketing always has held the creative types, while technology holds the rest of us geeks. If this split is maintained now, though, the best marketing content won't be delivered over the latest platforms, and entire market segments may be missed. Mobile applications, targeted e-mails that make it through spam filters, optimized Web sites, and ad widgets weren't part of marketing history, but are taking over the present and the future. Internal company departments need to work together now more than ever. The marketing types don't always need to understand exactly how to set up a blog or track feedback, but if no one on the team does, well, what a shame to waste good content.