Before Clickbait. Before Form Fills. When Content Marketing SAVED LIVES

Once upon a time, content marketing saved lives.

It didn’t just generate leads, it changed the way people understood the world.

It didn’t just build brand awareness, it provided powerful, actionable education that significantly altered the way important things were done.

It literally saved a great many lives. 

Before you publish that next piece of content marketing, take a walk back in time with me, will you? Way back to 1888.

1888

Republican Benjamin Harrison became the 23rd President of the United States in 1888, defeating not just the Democratic incumbent Grover Cleveland but also candidates from the Union Labor Party, the United Labor Party, the Greenback Party, the Equal Rights Party, the Industrial Reform Party and others we well.

Scottish golfer John Reid introduced the game to Americans for the first time, with a three-hole demonstration on a cow pasture in Yonkers, NY.

George Eastman patented the first rolled film camera and registered the name “Kodak”. More than a century before made-up words became common names for tech companies, Eastman explained that he thought that K was “a strong, incisive sort of letter” and he wanted something that was pleasing to the ear and likely to stick with people.

Thomas Edison patented the first movie projector, Jack the Ripper was striking fear into the hearts of Londoners, Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear...

There was a LOT going on in 1888.

Uh... Content Marketing?

Yes, yes. I’m getting there. The point is, 1888 was a long time ago and things were very different back then.

And you really didn’t want to have a grievous wound or require surgery. 

Surgeons wore (often dirty) black gowns. 

Hand-washing? Sterile instruments and bandages? Nope. The whole concept of “germs” seemed a little far-fetched.

“Some people found it hard to believe that invisible germs were causing the sky-high rates of postsurgical infections during that time,” explains Margaret Gurowitz, Johnson & Johnson's Chief Historian. “And surgeons who did want to try antiseptic surgery often lacked the resources and the technical know-how.”*

Enter Johnson & Johnson – Saving Lives with Content Marketing

Johnson & Johnson asked several leading medical and pharmaceutical practitioners to contribute to a manual entitled “Modern Methods of Antiseptic Wound Treatment”.

It featured step-by-step instructions for how to conduct antiseptic surgery and advice for sterilizing instruments and surrounding surfaces. It also explained the importance of thorough hand washing and urged physicians to replace their seldom-cleaned black coats with clean white jackets.

Gurowitz explains that “The combination of the manual and the company’s ready-to-use sterile products put modern surgical practices within the reach of most doctors and hospitals for the first time.”

Content Distribution

Johnson & Johnson distributed more than 85,000 copies of the manual, free of charge, to doctors, hospitals, and pharmacists in the first months of the campaign.

Within three years distribution reached 4.5 million copies worldwide.

Creating Demand with High-Value Content

They weren’t capturing existing demand, they were creating a massive swell of entirely new demand. 

They weren’t leading WITH their products, they were leading TO their products.

They weren’t using the manual as a “lead magnet” to capture contact information, they were freely giving it away with complete confidence that business growth would follow as they altered the world view of the people they needed to reach.

Is Real Education and Inspiration Gone Forever?

Is it too late to ever return to freely providing truly valuable content? It seems that it is when you look at how the vast majority of B2B companies go to market.

• Gated content with a barrage of emails and phone calls in its wake.
• Webinars that are extremely thinly veiled sales pitches.
• Floods of blog posts and content-farm articles that serve no purpose beyond SEO and backlinks.
• Dull, uninspired e-books and whitepapers that nobody reads and the creator doesn’t even care so long as they hit their MQL number.

We’re Going to Try

At Seismic, we care a whole lot about changing sales and marketing for the better.

Better for sellers. Better for marketers. Above all, better for buyers.

We’re not going to save any lives, but we can still do a LOT of good.

We’re definitely boosting some careers, contributing to the growth of some companies, and reducing the pain and frustration felt by a lot of buyers.

Our (Not Life Saving) Booklet

Our freely available, highly-educational "Big Book of Social Selling Excellence" is available now.

50 pages on how individual sellers - and entire companies - can think completely differently about *what social media (and LinkedIn in particular) actually is* and how to *build trust at scale* on the road to leaving their competitors in the dust.

Ungated. No contact info required. No sales follow-up.

If you love it and want to talk, we're here for you.

No lives will be saved, but we’re super-excited about doing some good.

Can We All Do Better? 

I know we’re not alone in striving to do better.

There are lots of others who want to escape the shackles of harvesting emails with gated content, churning out massive quantities of low-value blogs, and promoting sales pitches masquerading as webinars.

Their managers stand in the way. Their hands are tied by OKRs, KPIs, MQL pressures and all sorts of other shackles. Their jobs depend on hitting numbers that often do nothing but destroy trust and frustrate buyers.

I hope, in time, we can all do better.

* More about Johnson & Johnson's groundbreaking 1888 content marketing here.