Amit Kapoor currently is the Associate Director, Content Marketing at Cigniti Technologies. Amit is responsible for the end-to-end design, development, and implementation of the content marketing activities of Cigniti. He is responsible for continuously developing global content marketing strategies for the NA, UK, and APAC regions, and overseeing all marketing and content initiatives, both internal and external, across multiple platforms and formats.
Amit has been recognised as LinkedIn Content50 2018 and India's Top 100 Content and Brand Custodian 2017 by Paul Writer, the Global Top 200 Content Strategist 2017 by MindTouch, and the Most Influential Content Marketing Professional by the World Marketing Congress (2017, 2018). In this conversation Amit talks about how content marketing as a function has evolved over the years at Cigniti Technologies.
The big challenge is to get readers to click and open the blogs and other collaterals being published. Technology allows us to understand what works and when.
Content marketing is seen as an integral part of the marketing mix and complements the overall marketing strategy. During your tenure at Cigniti Technologies, how have the efforts and budget for content marketing evolved in the organisation?
In the initial days of my joining, the focus of content marketing was more on creating relevant and quality content consistently that would be spread across multiple social media platforms. I am happy to note that we were able to generate and refresh a lot of content on a regular basis. In my tenure of four years at Cigniti, I have seen the budget allocated for content marketing grow considerably to include critical investments being made in spends on AdWords, running campaigns, and a lot more activities.
In the survey, you mentioned creating topics that make readers click the content as the top challenge you face while developing a content marketing strategy. For our subscribers, can you define the top ways to tackle it? Also, how does technology play a role here?
While writing content that connects well with the audience, and that leads to prospects and clients for the organisation, is a prime focus of content marketing, it is a big challenge to get readers to click and open the blogs and other collaterals being published. The open rates of many emailers and blogs published are usually very low.
While the challenge is big, we keep reading and researching articles on the latest trends that are published on portals such as Forbes, Medium, Mashable, BuzzSumo, Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Livemint, to understand what kind of content and titles are being created, and read, by the decision makers and influencers. We then try to create titles and content, aligning it with the independent quality engineering and software testing services that Cigniti provides for multiple industries.
How would you rate your organisation's proficiency with the use of content marketing technology? Which are the key tools that assist your content marketing efforts?
I would like to say that at Cigniti we are continuously exploring the latest tools and platforms when it comes to implementing content marketing technologies. A few tools that we are exploring and using are BuzzSumo, Buffer, HubSpot, Ahrefs, and Google Analytics.
How has the use of social media for content marketing changed in Cigniti, compared with one year ago?
In the past year, we made a lot of significant changes in using social media for content marketing at Cigniti. We started with performing research on the type of content published on various platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. We read multiple reports and articles that talked about the right frequency of posting, the best days and timing for posting on these platforms, as well as the best suited content for each platform. While we achieved decent growth with the implemented changes, there is a long way to go.
How successful is your organisation at tracking the ROI of content marketing? What metrics do you use to measure content marketing success?
At Cigniti, we track the quality of our leads, both marketing and sales qualified, the web traffic, the kind of onsite engagement we generate, the SEO success of our content, and more.
What do you think the Content Marketing Done Right: Trends and Best Practices Report should cover?
I would like to see the report try to cover the practices that really work in generating leads and clients for organisations, instead of generic thoughts. A lot of reports are just numbers and statistics collected from multiple organisations. I hope your report on best practices actually explains a few.
