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What is content marketing?
Can anyone provide me with a definition and example of content marketing? Thanks!
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3 Answers
Ardath's description is right on and a practical way to think about content marketing. For what it's worth, in their book Get Content. Get Customers., Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett define content marketing as "a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
Building upon what Ardath said about content not being a sales pitch or promotional piece, an interesting by-product of the term "content marketing" is that it encourages product marketers to get out of the product-focused mindset.
Instead of promoting product features ad nauseam (a common occurrence, particularly in the world of high tech), product marketers are pushed to focus on promoting the company's expertise, insights, and knowledge where it intersects with prospect interests and needs. While this will naturally include describing the company's offering at some point (usually in content consumed later in the buying cycle), in many cases, the content won't be talking much or at all about the company's product or service.
Moreover, marketers need to literally market their content in order to be found where prospects spend time online. In other words, instead of promoting their products/services, marketers must promote their content/information.
This might help. Content Marketing Institute just published today (and distributed ungated on SlideShare) a case study on "How to Create Killer Content." They kindly and generously focused on some of the work Eloqua has done, which is, of course, immensely flattering. Hope it helps.
http://www.slideshare.net/cmi42/how-to-launch-a-killer-content-marketing-camp...
Yours,
Joe Chernov
Director of Content
Eloqua
@jchernov
Content marketing is the practice of delivering the right information to the right person at the right time based on helping them to solve a high-priority business problem that your company's products, services or solutions address.
An example of content marketing is a series of articles explaining an industry issue that impacts the achievement of a business objective for your target market, why resolving that issue is important to that prospect and what they'll get if they do so.
Other examples could be a white paper explaining best practices for resolving a problem or achieving an objective, a customer story that showcases the experience of the customer including obstacles encountered and overcome (more so than the products used) or a How To Guide showing the prospect how to build a business case.
The key is that the content must be considered useful by the audience it's intended to address rather than a sales pitch or a company-focused promotional piece.
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