Content marketing to move away from ‘likes and shares'; to focus more on customised ROI: Karthik Nagarajan of Wavemaker India

Most of the vanity metrics including likes, shares, comments, views are easy to obtain in large numbers for brands since most of the platforms supply them. Although they might be easy to obtain and buy, these metrics are often ambiguous when it comes to reporting a return on investment (ROI) or value to a business.

With the constant pressure to show immediate success a few marketers are still stuck with these vanity metrics, while others have already started to move towards more optimised metrics.

Karthik Nagarajan, Chief Content Officer – Wavemaker India, in interaction with BuzzInContent, shared that the industry is certainly now moving away from the standardised metrics.

“The industry has moved away from likes and shares significantly, already. We are moving towards a phase where ROI for content will not be as much of an industry-standard as it is a customised outcome for each brand. The ingredients for these in terms of measurability are almost there,” he said.

In terms of how the overall content marketing space will evolve in the next year, he shared that the creator economy will continue to be its primary focus.

Nagarajan said, “The creator economy will continue to be the focus of the industry. Both platform evolution (short video, Spotify subscriptions, etc) as well as monetisation (NFTs, etc) point to a content economy that is going to be driven by creators having direct access to their followers. This will be at the core of content evolution over the next few years.”

Influencer marketing has witnessed a huge growth this year, along with a few challenges as well in terms of being unable to create perfect brand integrated content pieces, the authenticity of a few followers, etc.

He foresees that influencer marketing aka advocacy will become even more data-driven as we move forward.

“Measurement in advocacy has been slow to take shape but it will become the fulcrum of spends over the next couple of years and new currencies will come into play. Data-driven brand safety will become an extremely important differentiator among platform partners,” he said.

Over the next few years, content marketing will become an always-on endeavour for brands, he shared.

At the same time, until the world goes back to the pre-pandemic level of growth there will be pressures on budgets. More than a constraint, he said that this will be an opportunity for innovation and to adopt an agile working style. Value will be at a premium and hence scope for measurement will also increase rapidly.

Upon being asked how the business for Wavemaker has been this year and how the same will grow for the next year, Nagarajan said, “It has been the greatest year ever for content at Wavemaker India. More data-driven advocacy, influencer-led commerce, innovating on audio, enabling content-led IPs and leveraging the creator economy in a brand-safe way will be some of the priorities for 2022.”