Content Marketing: The 21st Century Revolution that's Changing Everything
July 2008
Your job as a marketing professional is to get more customers to buy from you. It's that simple. This was true 50 years ago and it is still true today.
But you cannot get more customers to buy from you by relying on the traditional marketing approaches that worked 50 or even 10 years ago. Why? The Internet has transformed buyer behavior.
Customers have access to vast amounts of online information. They can find almost anything they want in order to make an intelligent buying decision. They want plenty of information from you, too, but they want it on their terms. They expect to gather the information they need without being interrupted by unwanted marketing messages.
Because this behavioral transformation is so new and so dramatic, most marketers find it challenging to adapt. Yet there is a way to shape this transformation to your advantage. That's what content marketing is all about and that's why this revolution is likely to be unstoppable.
All the rules have changed. You need to relearn the marketing game with a brand new marketing mindset. Those who can adapt will flourish. Those who don't...well...think of dinosaurs.
Why the Content Marketing Revolution is Vital to Your Success
Content marketing is the art of understanding exactly what your customers need to know, and delivering it to them in a relevant and compelling way.
Content marketing enables companies to build a level of trust among their customers that makes it easy for those customers to buy. This is easy to say but hard to do because it almost certainly means changing the way you think and act about marketing.
Old-fashioned marketing is less and less effective with the new breed of buyer.
Unfortunately, most marketers have been trained to approach prospects with bold headlines, flashy graphics and minimal text. We think of that as billboard-style marketing, which still predominates on TV, radio, and print platforms.
This approach worked very well when TV networks, top-40 radio, and authoritative trade magazines were monopoly information providers. Your job was to hype your product while your prospect was engaging with a piece of wanted content or information.
Today, it's completely different. In a world of infinite informational choices, buyers will only stop for what's truly relevant, and ignore the rest. Why? Both consumers and business buyers want to make up their own minds about what they need. They search out and find the information they need to get their jobs done better or make their lives easier.
By the time customers are ready to talk to you—the seller—they are armed with information about your company, people and products. This is true whether they plan to buy a Mazda or machine tools.
During that search process, you now have an opportunity to educate potential buyers about your industry, possible solution choices, best practices, and the right questions to ask before they ever call you or walk through your front door.
In this way, you have already begun a relationship that will make it easier for them to buy. That's how content marketing works.
By delivering content that is vital and relevant to your target market, you will begin to take on an important role in their lives.
This applies to your online, print, and in-person communications. And it's the same role that newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, conferences, workshops, and websites have played in the past. Now it's time for your organization to provide relevant, valuable and compelling content. And, when you do, you will be in very good marketing company.
7 Critical Lessons to Learn from Companies Using Content Marketing Successfully
Smart companies of all sizes are generating quality content equal to or better than what many media companies are producing. In so doing, they deliver tangible benefits to prospects and customers by providing relevant content that helps provide solutions to some of the toughest problems their prospective buyers are facing.
A brand new book: Get Content. Get Customers. explores content marketing in-depth and provides detailed case studies from more than a dozen successful practitioners. The book reveals that content marketing is delivering tangible, bottom-line benefits to companies as varied as:
- Northern Trust
- Rockwell Automation
- ThomasNet
- The BookSurge division of Amazon.com
- Fleischman Hillard Public Relations
- The Naples Chamber of Commerce (Naples, Florida)
- The UK law firm, Pinsent Masons
- Webkinz
- Constant Contact
- Mindjet
- A host of solopreneurs
Here are the 7 most important lessons you can learn from these smart marketers:
1. Only content that is intrinsically valuable to your customers will work as a core component of your content marketing strategy.
2. You must have a thorough understanding of your customers and what is most important to them. If you do not understand the problems and challenges they face, you cannot hope to create content that is truly relevant to them. Without understanding their problems, you cannot provide solutions.
3. A comprehensive content marketing strategy may provide a complete or partial replacement of traditional advertising and marketing. Such a strategy can be both more effective and less expensive than doing things the old-fashioned way.
4. Print magazines can be a powerful weapon within your content marketing arsenal. They enable you to reach out with precision to your customers with carefully targeted messaging that is totally under your control.
5. Your best content marketing investment may be in the creation of a dedicated internal or external team who understand how to produce great content and who live and die by the success of your content marketing program.
6. Relevant and valuable content is just the first step in turning a prospect or visitor into a customer. You must then make it easy for them to buy.
7. Most of the best practices from the larger companies profiled in the book can be emulated in whole or in part even by very small organizations. It's not the money. It's the content marketing mindset that counts. Big ideas can trump big bucks.
We are delighted to make this brand new book available to our eNewsletter subscribers at a substantial discount to the $24.95 list price. We have made a special arrangement so that you can buy directly from the publisher, Voyager Media, Inc., on the Amazon.com website. By clicking here, you will go directly to their listing. Simply enter the special code, J9CCYFJB, to get the MediaBrains 50% discount. This offer is good until July 31, 2008.
