Why are VCs pouring into the field of content marketing?

If you are in the marketing technology or the media marketing industry, then in the past 3 months time, must be a big wave of investment dizzy. Today, wind investment Jinzhengfangyuan into marketing technology, online distribution, and related fields. Don't you believe it, as I write this article, many content marketing companies get seed-round financing, not only that, many software companies and content companies that are in the content marketing world are getting more and more of a round of financing.

From the beginning of the new year, we found that more than $100 million trillion of venture capital has flooded into content marketing, such as newscred 25 million dollars in investment, percolate 24 million dollars, Sharethrough 17 million dollars, Mashable got 13 million dollars, BusinessInsider got 12 million dollars, Contently got 9 million dollars, TripleLift got 4 million dollars, and Flipboard bought zite with a cumulative 60 million-dollar price, and I only listed a small part of it.

But more recently, LUMA company has released a research report Lumascape, which believes content marketing is becoming saturated and many companies are coping with similar problems. There seems to be something wrong in the content marketing industry. Just two years ago, content marketing wasn't so much of a concern, but now why is this field so crazy growing?

On the other hand, a typical investment phenomenon also emerges. Investors will throw their money at companies that have been in the early stages of content marketing, and of course they are the leaders in the industry. When other companies discovered that investors had done so, they began to enter the field of content marketing, most of which were in the seed phase, but they also had access to capital, as a group of investors who did not get an investment opportunity in the first round offered them financial support. This phenomenon makes the content marketing industry become very popular, but also attracts more and more companies to come in.

Another problem is that market needs. Take the author's own company NewsCred for example, our clients include Procter and Gamble, PepsiCo, and Xerox, and we find that they often have three common problems:

1. Real-time communication

The rise of mobile devices and social networks has made people almost 7*24 hours online, changing the way people interact and consume and discover content.

Consumers need instant, so brands have to meet their needs, in addition to promoting the mass advertising campaign, it is best to have a 24-hour news studio, so that not only content production, but also to deal with content marketing workflow and manage the overall process.

2. Global consistency

All along, global brands have been hoping to find a way to align their brands with the local characteristics of different countries while maintaining consistency.

So what are their challenges?

Global companies need to ensure that their teams around the world are able to release the right and authorized content (preferably with sufficient content) at the right time. Not only that, but also to make consumers easy to access, easy to deploy, but also need to have some relevance with the local, while content marketing to make consumers feel useful, but also to inspire people. How do companies achieve these requirements? The answer is to have a unified content marketing platform that applies to the global context.

3. Multi-channel participation

Excellent marketing can reach the various channels, various devices of the audience groups. In fact, there are many channels, such as blog, write microblogging, real-time communications, even in the Snapchat to engage in a "after the burn" marketing activities, but if you want to attract consumers to participate in it, the brand will have to change their content marketing the overall process.

For this new problem, the brand needs a solution. Moreover, their marketing budgets are no longer devoted to traditional marketing channels, such as advertising, but into more effective marketing channels.

Creating marketing content is not an easy task, managing content is not simple, distributing content is more difficult. There is no doubt that market pull is the most practical. So companies that used to offer cheap content, or low-quality advertising copywriting, now have to reposition themselves, and if they can't think of themselves as a content marketing company, it doesn't matter if they do more polishing themselves.

Worse, some content marketing companies have positioned themselves as software companies. To be honest, the DNA needed to build the software is completely different from the DNA that builds a content marketing agency.

In addition to the various market challenges mentioned above, we have to face a new problem, that is, the content marketing market is too saturated. Too many companies are involved in the content marketing industry, and they are almost all over the content marketing process, including workflows, content manufacturing, curatorial, publishing, analytics, and so on. From many points of view, these companies are unable to achieve sustainability.

Another challenge comes from the financial industry, and the author here needs to say that many of the seed-stage startups will never get a round of financing. In fact, these startups address a small number of issues in the area of content marketing, such as aggregating freelancers, or developing a shared editorial calendar, and so on, which cannot trigger a large enough market.

In a word, the content marketing industry needs to be simplified.

Back to the beginning, after so many investment deals, we can say for sure that the content marketing industry desperately needs an integration. We may see some companies fail because the chief marketing officers at brand companies don't need N-content marketing companies to help them solve the same problem.

The company's chief marketing officers now have a choice of content marketing companies, according to Lumascape, which has at least hundreds of companies in the field, and is very confusing. However, the author needs to admit that the company to get venture capital is very exciting, but for the content marketing industry, the 2014-year quarter there are so many investment transactions is indeed noteworthy, it is necessary to dig deeper into the reasons.

Content marketing industry is rising, the author's only worry is that not all ships are ready to go to sea.