Content marketing what’s this?

Today I’d like to talk about Content Marketing, but, do you know what this exactly means? Content Marketing can be described like:

“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”

In simple words: Create real valuable content to attract customers to your website.

CluetrainManifesto

Cluetrain Manifesto cover

On the public web you can find a lot of opinions, voices, advertise, but not all is true, real and good quality. The increased quantity of voices and advertises generates confusion and customers frequently are really confused. Traditional advertise methods is less efficient than in the past due custom
ers’ caution or skepticism to accept what brands “push” on the traditional media.

In 1999, on the “Clutrain manifesto” has been written:  “A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter, …and getting smarter faster than most companies.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

In few words, people, using social media, blogs and all the communication methods available in the internet, can interact with other peers directly each other without any filter from the brands

 

Which is the difference between Content and Content Marketing:

  • Content marketing is about attract the audience to an experience you own, build, manage and tailor to achieve your marketing objectives
  • Content is really everything: commercials, sales content, customer service content, marketing & campaign content, adverts itself is a content.

Content Marketing is the king

content marketing -buying-cycle

Image source: https://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2293905/creating-an-inbound-marketing-content-strategy

This is the new slogan that brands and digital marketers adopted. This guys discovered that providing quality and true content, able to inform, demonstrate, educate and why not, enjoy customers, converts customers to be spontaneous promoters of your brands, advertising other customers of the quality/value of the products.

Where is the difference with the traditional marketing mechanism? It’s very simple, people is more keen to accept and trust suggestion from peers Vs. traditional marketing advertise and at the same time, consumers daily bombed by continuous advertise created an automatic barrier that self-activate when we get a “traditional advertise”. An example? Do we really pay attention to the TV commercials?  Statistics say that traditional TV advertise costs always more while it’s efficacy constantly decreases.
People doesn’t want to be stopped/interrupted, but wants to be attracted and engaged.

 

Content Marketing is impossible without great content and need to be harmonized with all the other strategic actions. Pay attention that due the fact this is a big magnet to attract customers, all the “traditional marketing activities” will have to happen just when customers will trust in us and what we offer and not before!!
Customers if they trust in what we offer becomes “evangelists” and, like described above, generate interests and leads of new additional customers.

 

In a next article I’d like to drill down into IT themes and solutions that help the successful deployment of what I’ve described above.

As usual I’d like to receive your feedback and point of discussions.

In the meantime, I’d like to suggest you some books related to the above topics:

  • David Meerman Scott: The New Rules of Marketing & PR
  • Handley & Capman: Content Rules
  • Alessio Beltrami: Come vendere con il blog aziendale (Dario Flaccovio editore) in Italian language

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