Companies value content but lack strategy: report

A new report finds that content is valued more and more by UK companies, with 30% viewing it as ‘business critical’.

However, this enthusiasm for content is undermined by the lack of strategy, and interference from senior management.

Sticky Content has surveyed 283 senior marketers and content professionals at companies throughout the UK and Europe to find out about attitudes to content creation.

 

The value of content

 

There are varying attitudes towards content, though generally businesses see its importance.

• More than 30% of organisations regard content as business critical and have employed staff responsible for content creation.
• 22% believe their company values content and have just begun to work on strategy and planning.
• 9% say their company does not value content and takes an ad-hoc approach to content creation.

Where do ideas for content come from?

 

The following chart shows where companies are sourcing their content ideas:

 

Barriers to content creation

 

Despite the appreciation of the need for content, companies face several problems in actually creating and releasing it.

More than 60% of respondents cited a lack of clear strategy or direction as the biggest challenge to content creation, while 30% percent said that getting content out of their business was the main issue.

If we look into the stats, we can see why. There seems to be lots of interference from management.

33% blame senior management for having a negative impact on content quality, while legal and compliance issues also prove to be a barrier – I imagine this is more apparent in certain sectors such as finance.

Q: Which of your stakeholders has the most negative impact on content quality?

 

The responses to this question are illuminating. Senior stakeholders may have the authority, but they don’t necessarily possess the best judgment when it comes to content quality.

Content produced by committee is rarely the best approach, and we can see from these results how creative ideas can be quashed or compromised by the interference of management.

Q: What happens when you have disagreements in your organisation about a piece of content that has already been prepared?

 

In my view, though legal requirements have to be taken into account, content teams should be trusted to do the jobs they were appointed to do.

The results here show that companies are making progress, but many will fail to see the benefits of producing great content if they don’t have the correct strategy behind it.

Content teams need to be able to work without too many restrictions, and having to wait for sign off from management. The key is to hire the right people and trust them to do the job well.