What is Content Marketing?

The Five Most Important Factors Required to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

Content Marketing [kon-tent mhar-ki-ting] n. The discipline of generating leads and product demand by nurturing relationships with targeted buyers by engaging in multi-directional digital communications that have direct or tangential relevance to the buyers’ needs or interests and adequately reflect the ability of the provider to satisfy those needs.

Why provide a definition of a term that is gaining more attention almost daily? Because I find myself at a particular spot on the thought map, in a ‘you are here’ sort of big red dot kind of way, and there are not too many references or landmarks to help get to the next point. As a practitioner and student of the currently evolving discipline I decided to add some of the reference points that I’ve discovered in the hopes that it would help others who get are searching for more on content marketing.

While there are some decent results to be found from a simple search on the term ‘content marketing’ (The Wikipedia definition of content marketing can be found here; Brain Clark’s Copyblogger Media offers these 5 insightful posts about content marketing, and Joe Pulizzi’s Content Marketing Institute is dedicated to educating the market place), the landscape of resources is fragmented at best and at worst completely unfocused.

Here are 5 factors to consider when evaluating content marketing as a discipline and determining how you will implement content marketing strategies for your organization.

Intimacy: The key word of the definition of content marketing is ‘conversation’. Content serves to generate and extend the conversation between a company and its customers or clients. There must exist a certain level of intimacy in this conversation. The company must develop a personality, employees must represent more than the company by embodying the company’s culture, and real people and faces have to be connected with the conversation in both directions. A great question for any organization to ask before entertaining content marketing strategies would be “are we prepared to put forth the people of our organization to publicly represent us, even if only by association, to our market?”

Customer Knowledge: Content marketing practices require that the organization know the customer in even greater detail than ever before. Again the conversation is critical, content is used to foster that conversation, therefore a mastery over the interests of the customer or client is an extremely valuable asset when publishing.

Publishing: Speaking of publishing, most that are currently writing, engaging or educating in some aspect of content marketing would agree that the mindset required is not of traditional marketer or public relations but as publisher. Content is centric, lots of it, and it has to be produced and presented to the marketplace. In other words it has to be published. Think like a publisher.

Distribution: The biggest mistake made today, in my opinion, is the rush to figure out social media tools.   To be sure, the tools are important, but only in so far as they propagate the message, ignite conversation and nurture the relationship with the buying community. First determine where your buyers are holding their conversations and then sort out how to use the tool that is best positioned to engage them there.

Lead Generation: Direct mail and email marketing is very well measured, the performance of such programs are consistently reliable, and the return easily calculated. Content marketing must be approached with similar expectations, create sales opportunities and generate revenue. There are plenty of tools on the market that are focused on this, but it doesn’t necessarily require software or consulting to sort out how to turn content into lead gen. The key is knowing who is consuming the content.

Content: The content itself matters.  What and how will the matters that interest your customers or clients be published? What frequency? What voice?  A determination must be made over the type of content that will be used to connect with your targets. There is much written about this topic. Here are two of my favorite resources. Mack Collier has a blog dedicated to the art of blogging. It is completely focused on blogging best practices. I mention this because in my opinion a blog is the best place to cut one’s teeth when they wish to begin publishing. The second resource is the book Content Rules: How to create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and more) that Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business by Ann Handly of MarketingProfs and well known blogger CC Chapman (SIDEBAR: I had good fortune of interviewing Ann and CC. Hear them talk about knowing the buyer; obstacles to starting a content marketing strategy; content strategy; and the metrics to consider when starting a content strategy). The book is a guide on how to create content of all types.  An excellent reference to have on hand when the organization is ready to begin experimenting with a new type of media.

 

Reference points. That is what I set out to accomplish with this post. Provide some perspective to those who are just beginning to orient themselves to content marketing. There are more factors to consider of course, how integrated must PR be in a content approach and how to drive adoption of social media and content strategy in an organization to name a few. We’ll save those for another discussion. In the mean time it would be foolish to end without trying to actually start a conversation. So why not take a time to offer your content marketing lessons learned, best practices or questions?

photo credit: 10ch