In marketing spheres, the phrase “content is king,” is not particularly news.

Search #marketing on Twitter, and it’s all you’ll see. And it’s fun to read, and It’s interesting, and It’s useful. It’s information about content marketing, gaining impressions via content marketing. Meta, isn’t it?

Anyway, as a newly self-identified content marketer, there’s no doubt that you’re considering the best, most successful, and strongest marketing platforms to showcase all this content (while also possibly scratching your head, trying to demystify the overwhelming vagueness of “content.” But that’s a whole other post. That’s a whole other book, really).

But in terms of where to showcase the best content, let’s analyze our options:

Email marketing works, but to an extent. And the breadth of that extent is shrinking with time. More brands utilizing email marketing as a promotional and informational tactic drives down the already low 20% average opening rate. Plus, smarter Exchange and Gmail bots are better recognizing promotional email and shuffling into the user’s overflowing promo inbox. Content marketing stands out, but not if it’s stuffed into an inbox infrequently checked.

Social Media:

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (the largest three) are also strong content distribution platforms, but making that content impressionable is a slow process. Growing a strong social media presence doesn’t happen overnight (assuming it’s organic. Non-organic social media followers are useless to companies; bots don’t have buying power, and people are simply sick of ads). Hashtags and account tagging is a strong way to increase your content’s visibility, but still is bound by time and engagement rate, so seeing meaningful ROI can be painstakingly slow.

In-store content:

In conducting this research, many people asked “Well, what’s the point of content in-store?” rationalized by the thinking: “customers already see the physical products, and they’re already in your store! That’s what content marketing is meant to do: capitalize on an interest in order to convert a regular person into a prospective customer. Traditional informational and promotional content converts “prospective” into “active,” right?”

Actually, no, no. Not true.

Content marketing, it turns out, is actually the most effective in stores. Marketable content is created to inform customers of problems and ideas that they care about, not push solutions in their face. It is meant to pull them, rather, towards a solution. So, when they’re in a store, they are surrounded by that solution as they are being informed of the problem that they are discovering, all in real time.

This in-store content display / distribution is the most popular trend of the last couple of years. And trust us (or research), it works, and pulls meaningful ROI.

I trust the research. Show me how to make it real.