I sat in on a very interesting webinar hosted by Awareness Networks today. The guest presenter was Joe Pullizi of Junta42.
Essentially the line of distinction between traditional publishers and marketers is blurring. The barriers to entry into publishing are low.
The key differences are that; money attribution comes from content in different ways- Publishers typically look for sponsorship revenues and brands look for sales and services revenues.
The difference to brands over advertising is that they now own the media vs. renting the media. The mixture of Social Media, SEO and story telling create the unique experience for customers and prospects for brands who use exclusive content strategies.
One quote I liked was from Seth Godin (referenced) "Content Marketing is the only Marketing left".
The definition of Content Marketing is:
"Attract and/ or retain customers by creating/ curating valuable and compelling content on a consistent basis to maintain or change a behavior."
As presented, the process includes listening and developing community with prospects and customers. This requires a very structured view of your current organizational structure and also culture. Many of the larger companies used outsource agencies to develop content considered "professional".
It's not out of reach for smaller companies to do a great job on story telling- especially using video based tools and curation platforms.The content must cut though the noise out there and have a real application to customers-either educate or entertain in the process.
It was suggested that teams "get super niche" on focus to become trusted experts on a topic or two related to customer interests and pain points they experience. The content packaging in the form of a CMS/ Blog portal can also include dynamic widgets to complete customer service or research questionaires. Fidning out what they are interested in allows you to continue to engage them and their peers with more useful content, knowledge and the fruitful interactions that can take place.
As I mentioned in another blog post regarding this process- it's content with context, community then marketplace. The content marketing strategy is not about constantly referring to internal dialogues about the brand-that's traditional marketing-it's not the push messaging we are looking for here in the Humedium!
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