INDUSTRY INFO
If you just read the headline of this post and thought, IS THERE confusion over content marketing? I'm not confused ... Then good for you. You can just stop reading now.
For the rest of you ... don't feel bad. It's one of those things that's just been happening for a long time, but nobody identified it as a thing. And sometimes when things don't have names, people can't readily identify it. They don't have anything to call it, so it seems elusive.
The term "content marketing" loosely entered the lexicon of marketing terms around the turn of the century. And really, mostly people working in advertising, media and consumer marketing were the ones using the term. It grew exponentially over the early 2000s. Now, no matter what business you're in, you probably at least know you need to be doing content marketing.
The most frequent questions I get are 1) What is Content Marketing? and 2) How do I come up with content? I really think I get the first question more often than I should, so I looked online at various denotations of content marketing. One of the first I saw was ... Content marketing is marketing a product or service using content." Really? .... No wonder...
So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to tell you the definition I use for content marketing and then I'm going to recommend some websites and other resources for you to investigate further. You'll soon get a sense of what people are talking about and once you read about some really successful examples of it, then you're well on your way of thinking how you can create content.
I like to explain Content Marketing as a form of marketing focused on distributing useful or valuable information to a targeted audience. The information must be desirable, so your audience comes looking for it, therefore your target consumers are coming to you, instead of you delivering your product message to them. Great idea; right? A lot of popular definitions suggest that the delivery of this information is online. This is mostly true, but it doesn't have to be. Classic examples of content can include entertaining videos on YouTube that somehow involve or address something related to your product; an entertaining blog about the problem that your product or business solves; an eBook or newsletter that targets the audience that your product is targeted to ... you get the picture, I hope. If not, review these websites and resources that will give you some excellent and successful content marketing examples.
Check out these sites: