Content Marketing is a clunky term for a marketing approach that relies on a wide arsenal of written and online material to win customers — rather than plain old ‘selling.’
I 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’re selling a lot of complex products like Cisco and AT&T do. When you’re selling expertise or brains, like KPMG. Or if you’re sellling consumer products like Crutchfield, or credit cards, like American Express.
Instead of hawking your HR software, you expend your efforts 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 show 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 another brochure on the featuresandbenefits of your latest product, you’re telling stories of some 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 a bit easier to get your stuff out there.