Publisher's Synopsis
Content marketing is the creation and sharing of content in order to engage current and potential customers, thereby building trust with the audience. The Role of Content Marketing Importantly, the content is not about you or your organization - it's about the audience. True content marketing delivers value to that audience. It provides information that helps people do their jobs better or live their lives better. When you provide high quality, relevant and valuable information, you educate. Content informs. It expresses an opinion, analyzes where an industry is headed, or presents new information that is newsworthy. Content Marketing is not... Advertising, Public Relations, SEM, Social Media, Although all of those channels can be used to market the content, they are typically more promotional, rather than informational. Got it? Good."Content marketing 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". This is the definition developed by the Content Marketing Institute and recognized by the international community of experts in marketing. Some other original ways in which experts have framed the practice of content marketing are: Content marketing is the opposite of advertising. It's about engaging consumers with the stuff they really want, in a way that serves your brand's purposes and ideals, rather than just trying to jam your logo into their periphery. It's reaching the exact consumers you want, instead of a vaguely defined demo. It's helpfully providing an experience they want, instead of trying to distract them from the one they came for. In short, it is the very evolution of advertising itself into something more effective, more efficient, and much less odious (Keith Blanchard - Story Worldwide). Content Marketing isn't also a tactic that you can just turn on and off and hope that it will be successful. It has to be a mind-set that is embraced and encouraged (C.C. Chapman, co-author with Ann Handley of Content Rules). Content Marketing embodies an organization's core brand elements. It uses a variety of media formats such as text, video, photographs, audio, presentations, e-books and infographics to tell your brand or company's story. It can be read on a variety of devices including computers, tablets, smartphones and others. It's distributed via owned, third party and social media platforms and it provides measurable results through the use of appropriate calls-to-action and promotional codes (Heidi Cohen - Riverside Marketing Strategies). A winning strategy succeeds when technology and people work together. Automation and semantics can help to filter, facilitate and uncover hidden treasures, but it is the human touch - thoughtful selection and consideration of content - that will create a truly new and engaging brand experience for audiences to discover, enjoy and share. In this sense Content Marketing is a winning strategy (Kelly Hungerford - Paper.li). Content Marketing isn't push marketing, in which messages are sprayed out at groups of consumers. Rather, it's a pull strategy - it's the marketing of attraction. It's being there when consumers need you and seek you out with relevant, educational, helpful, compelling, engaging, and sometimes entertaining information (Rebecca Lieb, author of Content Marketing "Think Like a Publisher - How to Use Content to Market Online and in Social Media").
