What is great content marketing?
It's a low-attention, low-trust world and today's consumers are faced with an unprecedented abundance of choice.
Your organization needs a content marketing strategy to cut through the white noise of today's marketplace.
In 2007 the consumer is like a Las Vegas tourist casually strolling down the Strip: senses repeatedly assaulted by hustlers, touts, pushers and pimps jostling for his time and money.
That's why compelling, targeted and well-delivered content that is relevant and valued by your customers will drive growth for your organization.
Great content marketing is a financial services company that issues a monthly newsletter - available in print or electronic versions – full of timely and valuable advice for private investors who want to manage their own portfolios.
Great content marketing is an online wine merchant that provides comprehensive tasting notes to all its wines before you buy. It is a specialist travel company that publishes podcast interviews with real travelers from far-flung destinations. It is a digital camera manufacturer that tracks what bloggers are saying about its products and uses their positive feedback on its website.
Great content marketers start from the perspective of what their target customers are looking for and package that content according to identifiable needs in a format that’s convenient and accessible. They distribute their content through the most appropriate channels to market and they optimize it for maximum search marketing benefit.
Great content marketers create niche and customized content based on specific insights from customers and not on generalized speculation about their values, attitudes, needs and motivations.
Why am I qualified to advise you on great content marketing? I work in the book publishing industry and so I know a thing or two about originating, shaping, packaging and disseminating content to meet closely defined customer requirements. As David Meerman Scott says in his excellent book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, it pays to think like a publisher. In fact this is exactly the way you need to think and behave to build an effective content marketing strategy.
Relevant and Valued will help you to drive more interest and involvement in your products, your brand, and your business by focusing on developing a content marketing strategy that is relevant to, valued by and acted upon by your customers and stakeholders.
From audit to diagnosis to implementation, this blog will show how you can create, craft and make your content available to get results in the digital age.
In a networked world, the rules are changing. A coherent content marketing strategy underpins the success of all your marketing activity. What you say about your own product, brand, business or organization and what others say about it is universally accessible and constantly evolving in today's Web 2.0 environment. You have to ensure that the content you generate is going to hit the mark and engage your prospects and customers: directly and authentically.
Your content is an asset - do you understand what it’s worth and how to grow its value?
Relevant and Valued will explore the best ways for you to originate, create, collate, source, assimilate, aggregate, store, distribute and remix your content to drive your bottom line.
Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.
Pete,
Well said. And thanks for mentioning my book.
How about this -- The definition of Marketing is the influencing of opinion through content.
Best, David
Posted by: David Meerman Scott | November 09, 2007 at 09:23 AM
Thanks for your comment David - your book is recommended reading for all marketers in my team in Cambridge, England.
Like the definition. I counter-propose: the definition of Marketing is the influencing of opinion through content, converted to profitable action.
Pete
Posted by: Pete Shemilt | November 09, 2007 at 08:51 PM