Content marketing is an umbrella term, one which focuses on matching content (information or entertainment) to your customer needs at whichever stage they are in the buying cycle or customer journey. Unlike TV, where the advertiser pushes messages to a captive audience, the focus is on engaging content, which means that marketers must think like publishers (attracting an audience) rather than seeing themselves as advertisers (buying an audience) of a product. The Internet has, in many respects, cut out the middle man. Consumers and brands can now connect directly through a number of easily accessible online platforms.
The Content Marketing Institute offers the following definition:
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 (Content Marketing Institute, 2013).
This definition applies to all the spaces in which you share content – your website, campaigns and competitions, a company blog or the social media space – as well as the way in which that information is shared.
Kristina Halvorson suggests the model illustrated below for approaching the different areas of content marketing strategy.
Content components
• Substance: Who are you trying to reach, and why?
• Structure:Where is your content? How is it organised? How do people find your content?
People components
• Workflow: How does your content happen?
• Governance: Politics, guidelines and standards (Halvorson, 2010).
As you can see in the above discussion, Halvorson suggests that one consider the bigger picture of content creation rather than just the product which is the end result. Content marketing looks at staff, tools, processes and outcomes. The end goal for these processes is, as outlined in the Content Marketing Institute definition, the delivery of a “profitable customer action”. All content should be created with a strategic outcome in mind.
