Brand Manufacturers Are Set to Invest More in Digital Content Next Year

As consumer and business buyers shift to shopping more online, it only follows that brand manufacturers must also invest more in creating better digital product content to support that shopping. A recent Content Marketing Institute survey of brand manufacturers found that 78% of brands are committed to producing better digital content and marketing in the coming year. Salsify research shows that it’s not enough to invest money and time into your content. Brand manufacturers also need a system in place to help them continually optimize that content strategically across the channels buyers rely on.

According to Content Marketing Institute, 56% of brand marketers increased their budget for digital content in the last year. Many brand marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget again in 2019 by 1%-9%. A majority of brand marketers (66%) plan on using more rich media content to support these efforts.

How can you determine which content, which products, and which sales channels to prioritize? Look to what’s bringing in your biggest percentage of revenue and understand how you compare to your competition, to know where changes to content will have the most impact. And then act quickly on those changes.

This strategy requires a content process that puts your content into one place, provides visibility into what’s working or what’s not and makes it easy to activate that content in every place it needs to be. The difficult thing about optimizing your content is not simply earmarking spend but successfully operationalizing it. Often, traditional systems fail to support end-to-end digital requirements. Many manufacturers find themselves trapped in expensive, endless loop of time-consuming data collection during upstream activities.

Salsify’s 2019 Trend Analysis found that 63% of high-performing brands optimize content on a daily or weekly basis to compete with the latest changes in the marketplace. On the flip side, 56% of low-performers did not move as quickly and were more likely to let weeks or months lapse before refreshing product content on retailer sites.

The first step is establishing the central repository and empowering everyone throughout your organization to leverage that information. Getting products and product information in the hands of each downstream partner – whether they are a salesforce, a distributor, a search engine, or a retailer - involves a massive amount of customization, time, and money.

Our latest eBook, How to Champion Digital Transformation Across Your Organization, can help you get started. Learn how to establish a central, canonical repository for all product information and digital content, and eliminate specific systems to individual departments or sales teams to improve accuracy, coordination, and oversight.