Evergreen content, inbound links, key influencers, social optimization—huh? In English, please?
Jargon about content, marketing, and strategy gets bandied about so briskly, it’s easy to feel alienated or lost. But this stuff shouldn’t just be the purview of specialists—it’s essential to make sense of these terms so you can navigate the evolving marketplace.
In each of these three areas, a huge shift has taken place; content, marketing, and strategy are now fundamental areas of internal decision making. To stay ahead of the game, you’ve got to understand what’s changing, why, and what to do about it.
Feeling lost? You won’t be for long. Through the course of this three-part series, we’ll demystify and illuminate these topics, making them tangible, valuable, and actionable.
Content Marketing – The Mindset of Content Driven Strategy
What’s content marketing? It’s inspiring or informing your audience with written, visual, or other content designed to evoke a response and provoke an action.
Effective content respects the audience and speaks with authenticity; it offers insights, advice, or analysis without pitching or promoting—and yet, it’s also doing something else, just under the surface: the content is discreetly tied to a brand or opportunity, generating greater exposure, engagement, and, yes, sales.
The Death of the Pitch
In the days before the internet, the pitch was everything. The supply chain revolution and social media changed that, putting a big box store in every home and a shopping cart in every phone.
We’ve become consumers of content first, products and services second. More and more, we rely on our social networks for recommendations. We know we can instantly find products—we don’t want a pitch, we want content that validates our relationships and appeals to our values.
To put it bluntly: it’s less about what you sell and more about what you say. Great content marketing makes your audience feel fully empowered, entitled, and integrated into a rich social environment.
Click here for Part 2 on Content Strategy.
Daniel DiGriz is MarketSmiths’ Chief Marketing Officer. He lives in New York, is a writer himself, and is President of MadPipe, a digital strategy firm that gets businesses more clients through digital marketing.
