Content Marketing
You’ve just heard someone mention “content marketing” and you get the idea you should already know what it is, but you’re too embarrassed to ask anyone. Congratulations, this post is for you.
aMarketForce, an online resource for information on all things content marketing related, defines content marketing thusly:
Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
The key word here is “Valuable.”
It’s what changes this definition from one that could describe almost any form of advertising or marketing.
You can tell if a piece of content is the sort that could be part of a content marketing campaign if people seek it out, if people want to consume it, rather than avoiding it.
So was VW’s 2014 “Game Day” commercial, which has been viewed on YouTube almost 18 million times, an ad, or content marketing?
The answer is it’s both, depending on how it’s received by each individual who is exposed to it.
The same will apply to any piece of content marketing you create, depending on whether the recipient received value from it or not.
Of course the goal is to provide as much value from your content marketing to as much of your target audience as possible.
At this point, despite this definition and explanation, you’re probably still wondering what exactly content marketing is.
Go back and read the content marketing definition one more time, but this time remove the relevant and valuable. That’s the difference between content marketing and the other informational garbage you get from companies trying to sell you “stuff.”
Companies send us information all the time – it’s just that most of the time it’s not very relevant or valuable (can you say spam?).
That’s what makes content marketing so intriguing in today’s environment of thousands of marketing messages per person per day.
Good content marketing makes a person stop…read… think… behave… differently.
You will definitely like to know more about Make no mistake: Dos and DON’T of Content Marketing.
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