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Over the past few years, content marketing has gained momentum as a tool in the marketing arsenal. The value of good content creation and storytelling by agencies and companies is growing. As emarketer discovered, 84.5% of companies in the U.S. with 100 or more employees will leverage digital content marketing strategies. And according to a HubSpot report, more than half (55%) of marketers said blog content creation is a top inbound marketing priority at their company.
I first heard the expression “every company is a media company” from a marketing colleague who runs Every Media Company, and it made perfect sense. The ship has been slowly turning toward self-generated content for some time, arguably since corporate blogs came online 10-plus years ago and YouTube took off (long before this eight-year-old was making $26 million per year).
It’s not new, but it is quickly becoming more critical. For many years, journalistic-like corporate content has been used in the B2B arena, and B2C businesses have only more recently caught on. Marketers have wisely chosen content as a way to educate through tools such as white papers or infographics, and thus began the realization that interesting content that draws attention is more about bringing something of value to the table than selling wares.
While the definition of content marketing is a bit subjective, for the most part, it can be defined as “the marketing and business process for 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.”
If you’re planning to put more effort into content marketing in 2020, here are some thoughts to consider:
Throw away your marketing hat and put on your media hat. To succeed at this effort, it’s important to approach content like a media person versus the spin of a marketing person. The content creator should think and write more like a journalist and produce content that can answer the question: “Why should I care?” or “How does this affect me? My life? My planet?”
Serve your reader, not the CEO. It’s critical to create meaningful content that is produced with the reader in mind — not for your CEO. Making the piece of content meaningful to its intended audience involves connecting with them by injecting a human dimension. This can drive engagement and build trust.
Use the power of authentic content to create community, and stay consistent. To create a community around your brand, avoid selling. Instead, authentically speak to how your service or product can help positively shape outcomes for the reader. If you can demonstrate this, and engage your audience through real, relatable examples, then the reader will be more likely to naturally want to engage. Even better, she or he could become an advocate for you and pass your content to others that matter.
Content is not just written. Let the message decide the medium. Is what you choose to convey better illustrated by storytelling from others? Perhaps it’s a video piece that includes several experts sharing their knowledge and talking about their experiences. Or maybe it’s about something tangible that is better shown rather than described.
It’s not just about content creation, it’s about content distribution. What good is thoughtful content if no one reads it? You should put just as much thought into how you will distribute content as you do in producing it.
All distribution platforms are not always the best fit. Choose wisely. While it’s key to ensure you make an effort to push your content out to your audience, it’s also important to be able to look at a platform and ask: Will that work for us? Does this reach our audience? Does this distribution platform properly represent our brand? For example, a cardiac health care company might not belong on Snapchat. There are a gazillion platforms for distribution these days, be it written or visual content. Don’t just “go wide” — it’s important to choose wisely.
So, should every company be a media company? Sharpen your pencils, folks — as we enter a new decade, the reasons are plentiful.
