The Importance Of Content

Ad-weary consumers are demanding more from marketers than the old fashioned chest-thumping commercial messages we have been dumping on them for years. Let's face it, they TiVo and they listen to their own tunes on iPods in order to escape commercials. Circulation and readership is down in the old media formats. What's a marketer to do?

Instead of marketing products and services, an increasing number of marketers perform content marketing as a way to break through the clutter and the ennui. What's content marketing?

Junta42 says it "is 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."

Make note of two key words in the above description: "relevant" and "valuable."

Content comes in many forms ranging from articles, news releases, research reports, white papers, surveys, audio and video. Even some humorous TV commercials - think Super Bowl ads - could be shoved into the list. Content can be delivered in a host of ways and it can be used tactically in order to accomplish a final strategic purpose: getting consumers to pay attention to your message.

Creating that relevant and valuable content we talked about earlier does several things for us. On the web, people link to pages that contain compelling, interesting or educational content. More links means more referrals from other sites means more traffic. High link levels may also give you higher search engine rankings. And the cycle continues.

Smart marketers don't just wait for people to come find their valuable and relevant content, they push it out. RSS [http://feeds.feedburner.com/my-creativeteam/delT] and eNewsletters are two key ways to repurpose and push out content or to alert people about where they can find it.

It shouldn't surprise you that traditional PR tools are among my favorites for getting the word out about the content. A news release about your latest new hire isn't that compelling but a release about access to your free Media Relations White Paper is. (Did you notice how I just pointed you to my media relations white paper?)

I've been a believer in content marketing for years but just didn't call it that. We'll be coming back to this subject and I think you will become an advocate too.