Digital media and content have never been more abundant. With a diverse group of channels, formats, and delivery methods, content fragmentation is a current concern for many content marketing enterprise teams. While you want to develop personalized content available in different mediums, you always want to ensure audiences have a choice and align with where your customers seek information.
Such content operations can be hard to manage, with pressure for more content throughput for each profile you are trying to attract. How can a modern content marketing team resolve the challenges and ensure consistency, reach, and engagement? We’ve got solutions to help you overcome content fragmentation.
What is content fragmentation?
Content fragmentation describes the increasing choices of how a user can consume content — including traditional and digital tactics. The landscape is huge and includes:
- TV
- Radio
- Mobile
- Digital (display, paid search, OTT/CTV (over the top/connected TV)
- Social media
- Mobile messaging
- Out of home (OOH)
That’s a lot of channels that someone could interact with content developed by your organization to inform, educate, attract, and convert them. The big challenges with content fragmentation for brands include:
- Message dilution if it’s inconsistent across channels
- Difficulty in reaching target audiences across a wide range of media
- Staying on top of content analytics about content preferences to inform future campaigns
- Pressure to produce more personalized content for a specific market
One key thing that’s a thread throughout these concerns is attention. How do you capture your audience’s attention when they have so many ways to consume content? The pursuit of attention is at the heart of truly solving content fragmentation.
The Attention Factor
In everyday life, so much is competing for our attention — our phones, the environment around us, TV screens, other people, and more. Let’s look at some data for context on content consumption.
In 2022, U.S. adults will spend 13 hours and 11 minutes daily consuming various forms of media. Traditional TV has the larger share, but digital continues to gain ground. Those numbers represent over half of someone’s day, from working on their laptop to streaming on their mobile to watching live local sports on the weekend. You also have to keep in mind that many people are consuming content from different devices at the same time. People watch TV and keep scrolling through social media, for example.
Image Source: eMarketer
There’s always the next story or topic your audience will move onto in the 24-hour news and media world. For example, trending topics on Twitter now have a shelf life of roughly only 11 minutes!
How can you compete with all the other noise in reaching your audience and delivering relevant content they’ll want to consume? Let’s look at how to solve the challenges of content fragmentation.
4 Ways to Solve Content Fragmentation
Here are some tips and strategies that can help you solve the challenges that content fragmentation creates.
Ensure Message Consistency
Message consistency can be a hot-button issue for enterprise teams. You have lots of products, buyers, and channels. Content marketers reported this as a challenge in a Content Marketing Institute (CMI) report, with 31 percent saying such.
The most impactful way to drive message consistency, no matter the variables, is to make sure everyone follows your content strategy. These guidelines and strategies are the foundation of every content project’s message. Yes, there will be nuances for different products and audiences, but all stakeholders need to stay faithful to your company’s value prop.
The best way to solve this is to ensure you document your content strategy, include key messaging, and provide access to it for all content creators.
Hone Targeting to Reach Audiences and Personalize Experiences
Audience targeting has significantly evolved, thanks to data. You now know more about your customers and prospects, including demographics, motivations, where they consume content, and preferences. You can look at the media landscape either as a problem or an opportunity. With the latter, targeting is about both who and where.
For example, it makes sense to use Snapchat and TikTok to reach Gen Z. However, channels like industry publications would be ideal for reaching healthcare executives. Knowing your audiences well is what gets you over the fragmentation hump of feeling the realm of media is too big.
You can also do segmenting and personalization in the media you own. Email marketing is always a winning channel for engagement, especially when you segment. Additionally, content on your website can target specific users. You could do this in several ways:
- Geography: Depending on where an IP address lives, you can show visitors content for their region.
- Define parts of your website for each buyer: Creating a section that clearly calls this out can improve engagement.
- Dynamic content: The content displayed is based on whether a person is a new or returning visitor to your website.
Targeting and personalization can be complex, but you can use analytics and other tools to streamline them.
Drive Insights with Easy-to-Access Analytics
Your content analytics tell the story around the topics, formats, and channels your customers prefer. Having these easily accessible and aggregated is critical to solving content fragmentation concerns. These insights power your targeting, distribution, content promotion budgets, and content calendar.
The problem for many enterprise teams is that they have a data fragmentation problem. You’ll need a robust content marketing platform that combines the data and provides useful reports. Sharing these as you build content plans and calendars will help you determine where to direct efforts for the best results.
Provide Full Content Visibility to Avoid Fragmentation Fails
Another challenge relates to subsets of content teams overlapping on projects. Without complete visibility, there may be a duplication of efforts, with different messaging going into various channels. You certainly want to avoid this, as it will confuse customers and skew results. Fortunately, with dynamic, shared content calendars, content is an open book, and everyone is aware of projects across products and geographies.
Clear Up Content Fragmentation with Content Tools
Many of the ways to overcome content fragmentation involve equipping your team with the right tools. The most turnkey platform you can provide is a robust content operations platform like DivvyHQ. It delivers visibility, offers access to assets and strategies, fosters collaboration, and more. See how it can solve your challenges by requesting a demo today.