Tomas Nemura is a renowned content marketing pioneer in Lithuania and the head of business development at digital content marketing agency Choco Agency. With the world showing signs of COVID relief, we asked Tomas to share some thoughts on the latest developments in content marketing in the light of the pandemic and why traditional agencies are still struggling to cater to the needs of B2B clients.
Media VS Content
Comparing the agency scene pre and post COVID, Tomas recognises the age-old battle between content and media people has nearly reached its end. “On the one hand, we had people with a strong media background preaching about high quality content and how almost anyone can do digital media planning. On the other, media planners were claiming that the only and most important thing is complicated algorithm-based advertising. Obviously, the truth is somewhere in the middle, but for years, these two couldn’t come to an agreement and were trying to quietly learn from each other. Now, COVID turned the table around and we, the content people, were forced to adapt media planning very quickly,” says Tomas. In fact, back in March 2020, 50% of Choco’s projects were dropped and the quick implementation of other disciplines provided for a threefold growth already in 2021. Moreover, Nemura sees positive changes on the client-side as well: less talk around cost and deeper understanding of the marriage between performance and format.
Business-to-business: let’s assume it will work the same way
B2B businesses have been frustrated with traditional agencies for quite some time now and there’s seemingly little enthusiasm on the agency-side to develop that competence. Tomas thinks the methodology is very similar to B2C, but no-one seems to bother about the technicalities and there are few cases to be studied. “It’s always “let’s assume it will work the same way”, which it never does. Most people have B2C backgrounds and clients are rejecting us due to the lack of experience and prior B2B case studies. It’s a closed loop,” says Nemura. He adds that most B2B competence in Lithuania lies in the hands of PR agencies and former public sector experts.
Content marketing is equal to adopting a pet
Most have dipped their toes in content marketing, but few have managed to transform it into a long-term strategy, not just a perk for SEO. Tomas has noticed that clients are now a lot more willing to invest time and resources into their content strategies. It starts from experiments, finding the best format and topic and then committing to that content for an extended period. Otherwise, it’s just another blog post.
Finally, to give some hope in terms of closing that gap between serious B2B and nonchalant B2C content, Tomas Nemura leaves us with a brilliant B2B content marketing initiative called Proto Industrija, which is a bi-weekly YouTube series documenting the ins and outs of notable Lithuanian companies.