Content Marketing is a clunky term for a marketing approach that relies on a wide arsenal instructional and informational material to win customers — rather than straight-ahead ‘selling.’
Think of it as marketing by teaching and helping. Selling by being interesting, by dispensing wisdom, by offering better advice and how-to than the next guy.
By turning your customers into geniuses.
It’s especially useful if you sell a lot of complex products like Cisco and AT&T do. Or when you are trying to sell expertise or brains, like KPMG. Or if you’re selling consumer products like Crutchfield, or credit cards, like American Express.
Instead of hawking your HR software, you are showing HR teams how to transform themselves into the most powerful recruiting organizations ever. Let your competitors yammer about their modules and integration. You are enabling superstars.
Instead of chattering about the specs of your industrial pressure washers, you are showing maintenance foremen how to get a fleet of grimy buses turned around — and back on the street — in record time. You’re raising fleet maintenance to high art.
Instead of cranking out PowerPoints on the featuresandbenefits of your product, you’re telling stories of the jaw-dropping things other customers are doing. (Or things they could be doing.)
In other words, ‘content marketing’ is what the savviest marketers have done for eons. We just have a clever name for it, now. And the Internet makes it easier to get your stuff out there.