The company is one of five nominees vying for the Best Content Marketing Tech Platform award. This category recognises the best technology platform that helps brands connect with their audiences through the use of mobile, video, data, analytics, social and/or visual storytelling online.

media update’s Nikita Geldenhuys asks Rogerwilco’s CEO, Charlie Stewart, why the marketing agency decided to make its in-house content marketing tool, WOLF, available to brands and agencies. He shares what it takes to make South African content marketing campaigns successful.

Why did Rogerwilco decide to make the WOLF tool available to brands and agencies?

At a commercial level, in common with most agencies, we've always been keen to develop products and tools that can bring in an annuity income. Opening WOLF up to other agencies helps us achieve this.

More fundamentally, however, by exposing WOLF to a broader market, we're hoping to receive feedback that'll help us enhance the product, ensuring it remains relevant as the broader content industry evolves.

What are some of the major challenges that South Africa faces when it comes to content marketing, and how can the WOLF tool help solve them?

Content sits at the heart of most brands’ marketing strategies and, as spend on content production increases, the marketplace becomes more congested and it becomes exponentially harder to identify topics that will resonate.

If content strategies fail to engage audiences and deliver a return on investment, brands will struggle to justify allocating further marketing budget to content production. This would likely mean a shift away from authentic ‘earned’ tactics in favour of a less compelling ‘paid’ approach to brand building.

With consumers becoming more savvy and less trusting of conventional advertising, this would be a major setback for the marketing profession as a whole. By helping organisations understand what consumers are interested in and showing them where gaps exist, WOLF significantly increases the likelihood of them producing content that will achieve their goals.

What is your opinion on the quality and quantity of content marketing in the country?

The industry still lags behind its counterparts in the US and Europe. While we've certainly seen a sharp improvement in the quality of content people are producing, too few organisations appear to have a compelling strategy behind their content marketing exercises.

For content to actively contribute to business goals, there needs to be a clear understanding of 1) how it can influence consumer and B2B buying cycles and 2) the requirement for different types of content that can educate and nurture prospects as they move through the buying decision process.

What has the industry’s response/uptake of WOLF been like so far?

After using WOLF for our own clients over the past year, we've gradually started to offer it to other agencies. As a typical WOLF report contains millions of data points that require careful analysis to produce meaningful insights, we're offering it as a managed service rather than as a licensed tool, so at this stage we've only made it available to a handful of key partners.

Local interest started picking up after WOLF won an Assegai Award towards the end of last year and it has accelerated since winning two Bookmarks in March. And we’ve had a fair number of enquiries from overseas since it made the shortlist for the Digiday Content Marketing Awards.

Read more about the WOLF tool at www.rogerwilco.co.za.

Find out what to expect from content marketing in 2017 in our article, Five content marketing trends that survived 2016.