CONTENT MARKETING IN POLAND
The article was originally published in the Polish content marketing chapter of the CANnual Report 2017 by Grzegoz Dziegielewski, Content Designer, Walk (Poland) and Dawid Bartosik, Content Director, Walk (Poland) The term ‘content marketing’ has made a remarkable career in the world of media and advertising. No respectable agency portfolio would neglect this kind of tool. Although this phenomenon may reflect the tendency to give a trendy name to an already established activity, a growing number of companies appreciate a more profound approach to the subject. As the resilience of consumers to traditional advertising and the content overload on the Internet is growing, communication between brands and consumers seems to be returning to its roots. In order to stick out and reach their target audience, brands strive for attractive and substantive content. It was Bill Gates who first proclaimed in his essay – published in 1996 – that “Content is king”. It took more than a decade for marketers to digest and embrace his motto. Until a couple of years ago, the Internet media was not capable of user segmentation – e.g. in terms of age, residence, income and interest –, but brands now are able to reach meticulously selected groups of potential consumers. Hence the opportunity has arisen to implement innovative solutions called content marketing in the process of brand image building. The term has been gaining popularity in Poland since 2004 just like in other countries, and this is well illustrated by a chart in Google Trends. The term showed a rising popularity after 2011 and the search for the term almost tripled in 2014-2015. In the spring of 2015, the book “Content marketing po polsku” (Content Marketing the Polish Way) by Barbara Stawarz, the first Polish guide on the subject was published, which must have helped the term to enter the market for good.
Content Marketing Research in Poland
Since 2015, several reports have attempted to map the domestic content marketing scene. One of the firsts to be published was the Content Marketing Polska Association report in March 2015. In the research, 66 out of the 73 participating companies acknowledged that they wanted to put content in the focus of their strategies in the following three years. It is worth mentioning that only half of the companies had content-oriented strategies at the time. In addition, 81 percent of the respondents agreed that the quality of communications would prevail over quantity in the years to come. However, the respondents agreed that future financial decisions would be made with the benefits of content marketing in mind.
Another report – published three months later by the Interaktywnie.com magazine – put the opinion of experts into words. It stated that instead of being considered for its sales boosting factor, content marketing should be recognized from a strategic point of view, highlighting its focus on quality content.
A year later, a subsequent edition of the same report went even further. It defined content marketing as a combination of traditional journalism, advertorials, blogs, search engine optimization and social media, and implied that content devoid of a good strategy was unable to survive on its own. The report also mentioned a crucial challenge the business was facing as content marketing came to the spotlight: the problem of measuring campaign effectiveness. Since they tend to focus on brand image building, it is often difficult to evaluate them.
The evaluation of content marketing campaign effectiveness was in the focus of a report of WhitePress in 2015. The report demonstrated that the vast majority of marketers considered content marketing a difficult field. Still, 57% of them were moderately satisfied and 29% of them were hugely satisfied with the developments of the field in those days.
A more detailed analysis also revealed that the level of satisfaction was proportional to the expenses allocated for this purpose. It might have been for this reason that 50% of the companies in question were planning to increase their content marketing budget in 2016.