siliconindia | | March 20188MAKE YOUR CONTENT STANDOUT FROM THE CLUTTERBy Vinoth Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO, PaperfliteHeadquartered in Delaware, Paperflite is a full-fledged Content Development & Management company specializing in the areas of Sales Enablement & Productivity, Sales Acceleration, Content Discovery, Prescriptive Content, Presentation Management, Sales Intelligence, Content Tracking, Sales Software, Sales Tool, and many others.A fter spending the better part of the last decade as the dar-ling of the marketing world, the excitement that drove content marketing adoption seems to be on the decline. Gartner famously rang the first warn-ing bell all the way back in 2015, when it placed content marketing on the de-cline side of their Hype Cycle model. Surprised? Well, you shouldn't be ­ with about half of the world's popu-lation on the internet today, and with access to both content creation tools as well as new content being easier than ever before, the world wide web is now practically neck-deep in content. Compare that to the early 2000s, when video content was controlled by media networks, and the idea of indi-vidually-created content and reaching an audience of millions was laughable. The same is true of other forms of con-tent as well. Therefore, when you're competing with numbers like that, it's easy to understand why so many mar-keters might tend to not see the value in creating content today. But should we treat this as the Great Depression of the content marketing age? Or are we now finally making our way out of Gartner's `trough of disillusionment'?As someone who has worked ex-tensively in the content marketing and sales enablement industry, I feel bullish about how Content Market-ing can drive newer ways to connect with buyers. The need for content has not waned. Instead, the importance of content that adds value and engages the consumer has increased manifolds. Your audience is not simply consum-ing less; they're actually pickier about what they invest their time in.By making sure that you focus on creating value for consumers, you are no longer dependent on specific chan-nels or media. `Content' has expanded now to include everything you do online ­ emails, forms, FAQs, technical doc-uments, and more ­ and pigeonholing your content creation into specific silos is a losing strategy. Hiring a business-blogger is not good enough anymore, not when your consumers are looking for infographics, or videos, or even quality audio podcasts. Gone are also the days of `if you IN MY opinion
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