Content can add value to a business through stakeholder engagement, says Sean King, CEO of Seven

"Brands are now expected to provide value to their customers and stakeholders by creating content"

Sitting on a plane after three fabulous days at the Forbes Media Global CMO conference in Miami, it's hard not to feel excited about the future of marketing, and in particular the growing importance of content to brands everywhere. 

Being in the company of CMOs from 100 of the biggest brands in the world was a real privilege. The likes of Visa, Cisco, HP, Amex, IBM, Ernst & Young and Ford were all discussing how marketers add value to their businesses, facing up to the challenge of how social and digital are rewriting the rules in an 'always-on' world. Check out #ForbesCMOsummit for some of the highlights. 

What also struck me as the CEO of Seven - we are leading the charge in content marketing - was just how important creating engaging, high quality content was to everyone at the summit, regardless of size and whether they are targeting consumers, businesses or other stakeholder audiences.  

In the era of big data and personalisation and the explosion in social and mobile, brands are now expected to provide value to their customers and stakeholders by creating content that is genuinely useful and/or entertaining.

It doesn't seem that long ago that I spent my time making the case for content. But now, every senior marketer, media owner and media agency I speak with is 100% certain that content marketing is the hottest subject around today. I didn't have to explain what it meant to a single person. They get it. 

So as I see it, there are now three key challenges that brands need to address if they are to capitalize on the opportunity that content marketing presents. 

Firstly, everyone should stop worrying about what is or isn’t ‘content’ and start focusing on what content actually achieves. A TV ad clearly involves very different skills and resources to an editorially driven website or internal magazine. So regardless of the communications challenge, brands need to find experts who can work together. 

The second challenge is establishing the fact that creating great content isn’t enough; it’s just as important to optimize its distribution. A great content marketing strategy doesn’t just plan and create valuable content, it also defines the context, audience and appropriate channel strategy to ensure that as many people find and share the content as possible. 

My final challenge is for brands to define the role that content plays alongside other marketing disciplines. Seven recently released research undertaken alongside ISBA and YouGov that explored the relationship between content marketing and advertising. It found that though advertising is perfect to make a brand promise, content is perfect for delivering on that promise everyday, whenever and wherever the audience wants it. 

Brands that can address these challenges – and think about their audiences ahead of the constraints of silos, habit or presumed channel preferences – will be the ones to prosper from content marketing. 

Sean King is the CEO of content marketing agency Seven.