In cross-channel dialog marketing, the quest for relevant content is higher than ever. Most marketing is really about dialogs and community but in this context I’m mainly talking about tactics we traditionally classify as dialog marketing, including email marketing.

As the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs found in both their B2B and B2C content marketing benchmarks, the production of engaging and relevant content ranks among the main challenges in content marketing as you can see in the screenshot from the B2B report below. Furthermore, finding “enough” content is a key content marketing challenge too. How much is enough? As much as you need to fulfill your different goals and engage the different target audiences.

The challenge of finding highly relevant content is everywhere, regardless of the channel or the market. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that ever more large marketing and PR firms are launching content marketing practices or divisions as we saw again this week, with Mindshare and Edelman, with Steve Rubel as Chief Content Strategist.

In dialog marketing and cross-channel marketing the challenge of finding relevant content is extremely high as well. I talked about it last week from an email marketing context.

In a new guest blog for Vocus, MarketingSherpa‘s Daniel Burstein posted a chart from his company’s latest Email Marketing Benchmark (edition 2013). As the chart (see below) shows and Daniel emphasizes, delivering highly relevant content is the top challenge for email marketers the coming 12 months. In other dialog marketing tactics, we see similar challenges.

Isn’t it weird that ‘finding’ and ‘creating’ relevant content is such an issue. After all: aren’t the stories, informational resources, personalized offers and other forms of content everywhere in our companies and our ecosystems? Isn’t it just a matter of having a good content strategy (not the same as a content marketing strategy)? It partially certainly is. However, email marketing, as some other marketing tactics, is also a bit in a particular situation, as I wrote last week.

Despite the need for relevant content, only 28% of email marketers report sending relevant email communications. You might think email is not that important anymore but it still is the main component of an integrated marketing approach and the glue of many marketing efforts.

So, how do you get that “highly relevant content”? There are dozens of tips and ways. But, instead of summing them up, I invite you to take a look at the presentation below by MarketingSherpa on ‘Producing Engaging Email Content’. By the way, you’ll notice it was done in collaboration with ReturnPath. For those who are less familiar with email marketing: that’s a firm, specialized in email deliverability. And guess what one of the most important elements is becoming in what is known as ‘inbox placement’? Engagement and thus indeed…content.