Last month I attended two most relevant content marketing events: Content Marketing World in Cleveland and POMP in Ljubljana.

The former is the largest global and the latter the largest regional event in the industry. Having attended them, as a professional who has been in communications for more than 20 years, I can say that the marketing we in Serbia practice lags behind in many aspects. It doesn’t mean that we won’t be practicing it in the same manner in the next 10 years, but we need to be realistic – we are at the communications outskirts of global trends due to a lack of money, rather than knowledge.

But, what is the situation in content marketing like? I’m glad that the issues we encounter seem to be the same as the issues experienced by those who are much more developed than we are. Joe Pulizzi – the Content Marketing Institute founder, says that one of major challenges of the profession is still how to sell content marketing within a company.

Even in large global companies, there is resistance to content marketing, primarily due to ignorance of decision-makers. It is all the same for them and they have no intention of breaking their own communication silos in order to provide different internal teams with content everyone needs. Some still perceive their external influence as one-sided, through advertising in large media outlets or likes on SoMe. Others don’t have time to wait for fruits of content marketing, since it sometimes takes more than a year to get initial results. Anyway, we are not the only ones having the problem of explaining to management that content marketing is useful, but that it takes time.

On the other hand, those who have launched strategic and planned content production are now going very far and it is becoming a cornerstone of the overall integrated communication. There are no more advertisements, event organisation, SoMe communication if a strategy of creating content for all useful channels is not devised first.

Content is the king and everything revolves around it. As MD of German agency C3 Karsten Kramer told me, they have clients who still cooperate with seven or eight different agencies, but the lead is now a content agency, rather than a creative one. With some companies, such as Microsoft, they have especially established joint teams with several dozens of creators, operating as a separate business unit. On the other hand, companies are increasingly reducing the number of agencies they cooperate with, transferring some activities to content agencies, as they have the most comprehensive area of work.

In any case, we were the first in Serbia to enter this discipline. Many still dispute it as something that is not different from traditional marketing activities, but I believe that content marketing has brought a revolutionary change to the perception of marketing. It’s no longer the industry that interrupts and distracts people in their everyday activities by “kidnapping” their attention. It’s the professional area that helps them tackle issues and get what they need!