– Think like a publisher! That’s the philosophy behind content marketing. The discipline is not new but has had a kind of digital renaissance in recent years.
Content Marketing: A Definition
The term content marketing has been in use since 1996, but the person who has probably done the most to make it known is Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) in the USA. His definition reads as follows:
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Typical examples of this type of content are e-books, whitepapers, blog posts, video clips, e-courses, reports, articles, podcasts, infographics, webinars, events, and a host of other combinations of text, sound, and images.
An Old Marketing Discipline
As you can see, this is nothing new. Companies have built brands with content (useful stuff or entertainment, not advertising) for at least 150 years. Many of them you already know well: John Deere, Procter & Gamble, Red Bull, Coca-Cola, and CMO.com (owned by Adobe) – which you as a marketer may also know.
Yes, these are giants. However technological development has made every person with a smartphone a publisher, and we see that marketing departments are gradually beginning to look more like media houses and that it is the big brands that hire the most journalists.
Red Bull describes itself as a media house that happens to sell a drink, and their media department employs over 1000 people. Content Is King After All and has had its renaissance after the start of the internet era.
Marketers should adapt to this reality, and find out how they can use content as a supplement to – and not a replacement for – traditional advertising (selling ads and the like).
Read also: The historical origin of content marketing (article in Norwegian!)
The Benefits of Content Marketing
If we for a moment push all academic definitions aside, marketing and sales are about three things:
- Get people to know you
- Get people to like you
- Get people to trust you
This is how you get into a position where the customer eventually buys from you. Again. And again. And again …
It’s not as easy to succeed with traditional, interruptive advertising. Around the clock, we are bombarded with advertising messages that want to sell us something. And even though the products may be good, we ignore most of them.
Content marketing gives you a new dimension in the customer relationship, a glue that makes your sales messages stick better in your customers’ heads and hearts.
Content is also an important driver for building thought leadership and attracting new employees and investors.
The 5 Main Pillars of Content Marketing
To be more specific and explanatory about what content marketing is – or should be – CMI has developed the “Five Pillars Of Content Marketing”:
- Editorial content that tells a relevant and valuable story. It must be informative, educational, inspiring, and/or entertaining.
- Supported by marketing. The content has underlying sales and marketing goals that the business is trying to achieve.
- Driven by customer behavior. Seeks to maintain or change the recipient’s behavior.
- Multichannel. Print, digital, audio, video, events. Can, but does not have to be integrated.
- Targeted at a specific target group. If you can’t explain who the target group is – then it’s not content marketing.
This article was originally posted on www.markedsheltene.no and was written in Norwegian by Erlend Førsund. The content is republished with his permission. Erlend was my colleague for a few years, first in MarkedsPartner and later in Amesto Growth. He started later as a freelancer.
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