COCA-COLA 70/20/10 MARKETING ORIGINS

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you know that content marketing is still high on the list of industry buzzwords. You read about how companies like Coca-Cola are investing big money in content marketing strategies. You see email titles and article headlines touting tips to personalize content for your customers. You may even attend conferences on the subject, worrying that your brand is falling behind because you’re missing out on the latest digital content best practices.

Forget all of that for a second – open a Coke – and look at one of the best examples of content marketing in the world: Coca-Cola’s content marketing strategy.

Coca-Cola became a true leader in content marketing by waging war against traditional press releases and corporate content with its digital media platform, Coca-Cola Journey. It’s part of the larger Content 2020 marketing strategy based on the premise of moving from creative excellence to content excellence – a major shift from pushing out messages to pulling in customers to engage with the brand and each other.

Brands of all shapes and sizes can learn from Coca-Cola’s application of the 70/20/10 budget rule to guide content development and investment. This pyramid helps marketers budget across different digital investments by dividing them into now, new and next.

70 20 10 MARKETING BUDGET RULE

Now: 70 percent

This is the bread and butter marketing activities that 70 percent of your electronic marketing budget should go to. It’s the now of your digital activities and storytelling – low risk, not overly time consuming, and, most importantly, it pays the bills. This includes video, basic content creation and search marketing. The results of these activities are known and can be fairly accurately forecasted.

New: 20 percent

Apply the next 20 percent of your budget to innovating from what worked in the 70 percent bucket. This type of content strives to be new, innovative, and deeply engaging with more specific audiences. This includes social media, mobile marketing and outreach. Your investment in this category may not see an immediate return, but it lays the groundwork for the future and helps outpace the competition.

This is where many companies falter with content marketing and it’s because they don’t perform the necessary analysis and analytical work to measure past content. Setting content goals with specific benchmarks and iterating based on the results is the fastest way to differentiate yourself from the competition and make your content more relevant to target audiences.

Next: 10 percent

The last 10 percent of your budget should go to high-risk, high-reward content. It’s the groundbreaking ideas that haven’t been tested – new ways of connecting with audiences that could become tomorrow’s 20 or 70 percent. It’s the portion of your budget that’s meant to see into the future, and when done right, can pay big dividends by setting you up as a trendsetter in your niche.

The takeaway here is to create content at different levels because spending all of your resources at one end of the spectrum or another means sacrificing either quality or consistency.

As crazy as it sounds, innovation is best grown when systems are set in place. You can create models, analyze data and scale ideas that win.

No matter what your budget is, you can learn from Coca-Cola’s strategy of creating innovative content that pulls audiences toward your brand instead of pushing your message toward your audience.