Content Marketing Must Be Targeted

Lee Odden recently posted a great interview with David Meerman Scott on the topic of social media marketing. At one point, Lee asks David to make quick word associations. In response to “content marketing”, David says -

“People don’t know what the word “content” means. I wrote a book in 2005: Cashing in with Content. That book is just as well written and groundbreaking as The New Rules of Marketing and PR, but it suffers from a horrendous title. Because nobody associates content with marketing despite many people trying to make that association, including me. I am trying not to use phrase “content marketing” because many people don’t know what ‘content’ means.”

Well, when people like David Meerman Scott avoid the phrase content marketing, it gives me pause. However, since I have a box full of business cards with the title Director of Content Marketing, I’m thinking maybe I should take a stab at defining what content marketing is.

In my view, content marketing is simply this – Using words intelligently and systematically to engage your market with purpose.

Words. Digital content marketing has two (I would argue) equally important targets – search engines and humans. Words must attract the attention of search engines to draw people to your content. Words must hold the attention of people to motivate them once they begin reading.

Intelligently. Writing effective web content requires a knowledge of SEO (see above) along with an understanding of grammar and persuasive composition techniques. Intelligence also means selecting the right media to convey your content – a task that becomes more challenging by the day as social media sites and blogs expand and fracture and evolve.

Systematically. If I’ve learned anything over the last 10-15 years in web marketing, it’s this. Content marketing is not a thing, it’s a process. It’s not a web page or a blog post. Instead, it’s a circle of strategy followed by execution followed by analysis followed by strategy.

Engage. I choose this word very carefully. We all know we don’t talk at customers, right? Today, a great deal of content marketing is highly conversational. We seek to engage customers in conversations, possibly in real time. But even content that is not designed for conversation – such as an email blast – must engage the reader. Content must communicate a call to action or evoke an emotional or intellectual response.

Your market. The web is all about niches, so content marketing needs to be clearly targeted. With whom do you want to communicate? This is the first question I ask a client when we begin talking about a new project.

With purpose. The second question I’ll ask on a new project – What response to your message are you looking for? Is it a call to action, such as placing an order or downloading a PDF? Or is it an emotional response, such as becoming more enthusiastic about a brand? Without purpose, there’s no strategy and no ability to evaluate performance.

I highly doubt this little blog post will bring worldwide illumination, but should we throw in the towel on content marketing as a term and a discipline? I don’t think so. If anything, content marketing is becoming more important and central to marketing efforts of all kinds. Greater and greater percentages of company spend are being directed to digital marketing, and what is digital marketing about if not content?


Interactive Marketing Agency
Make Every Click Count®

Content Marketing from Word Sell

Interactive Marketing from Northbound

straightnorth: Word Sell has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.