Content Marketing: Revolution & History

This is the definition developed by the Content Marketing Institute and recognized by the international community of experts in marketing.?

Another?original ways in which experts have framed the practice of content marketing are:

? Content marketing is the opposite of advertising. It’s about engaging consumers with the things they really want, in a?way that serves your brand’s purposes and ideals,?instead of just trying to jam your logo into their periphery. It’s reaching the precise consumers you want,?rather than a vaguely defined demo. It’s helpfully providing an experience they want,?rather than trying to distract them from the one they came for. In short,?it's?the very evolution of advertising itself into something more effective, more efficient,?and far?less odious (Keith Blanchard – Story Worldwide).

? Content Marketing isn’t also a tactic that you simply can just turn on and off and hope that it will be successful.?it's?to be a mindset that is embraced and encouraged (C.C. Chapman, co-author with Ann Handley of Content Rules).

? Content Marketing embodies an organization’s core brand elements. It uses a spread of media formats such as text, video, photographs, audio, presentations, e-books, and infographics to inform your brand or company’s story. It is often read on a variety of devices including computers, tablets, and smartphones at all. It’s distributed via owned, third party and social media platforms and it provides measurable results through the utilization of appropriate calls-to-action and promotional codes (Heidi Cohen – Riverside Marketing Strategies).

? A winning strategy succeeds when technology and other people work together. Automation and semantics can help to filter, facilitate and uncover hidden treasures, but it's the human touch – thoughtful selection and consideration of content – that will create a truly new and engaging brand experience for audiences to discover, enjoy and share.?In this sense Content Marketing is a winning strategy (Kelly Hungerford – Paper.li).

? Content Marketing isn’t push marketing,?during which messages are sprayed out at groups of consumers. Rather, it’s a pull strategy – it’s the marketing of attraction. It’s being there when consumers need you and seeks you out with relevant, educational, helpful, compelling, engaging, and sometimes entertaining information (Rebecca Lieb, author of Content Marketing “Think sort of a?Publisher – How to Use Content to Market Online and in Social Media“).

The definition of content marketing further depends on the author’s viewpoint and background, but the principles of good content marketing and essential strategies and principles are very much alike in most cases.

One of the key similarities in all the different ways of looking at content marketing is that the customer experience and the needs, preferences and questions of individuals and the so-called target audiences are at the center.

Consistent use of relevant content runs like a thread through all marketing activities.?Good content is important everywhere so using it in a smart way is key too.?

Content marketing may be a?narrative form of marketing that provides customers with useful information, at moments once they are interested in receiving it, in an enticing, not “sales-ey” way.?this permits it to break through the advertising clutter that consumers ignore or view skeptically, while it gently persuades prospects and helps buyers and therefore the public.

Even if Content Marketing may appear to be a recent innovation in marketing practice, really it’s simply a replacement technique to convey the same information that consumers have always wanted about products and services. Its power has been exponentially improved with today’s social media platforms and other devices.?

2.2 History & Evolution of Content Marketing

Sometimes,?once we speak of Content Marketing, one is led to think that it's something new and innovative designed especially for the internet, but history says that's not so. Content Marketing may be a?success coming from the past,?it's?something of a practiced craft with a longer history than we might expect. The story of content marketing spans the past 120 years, beginning with a?leaven manufacturer that published a revolutionary practical cookbook.

By the way,?we frequently read or hear about “Content Marketing“, i.e. the creation and sharing of media and editorial content by companies so as to acquire customers,?it's natural to think that we are faced with something relatively “new” and designed specifically to be conveyed through social media, but let’s examine this infographic created by the Content Marketing Institute, which illustrates, in short, the history of the Content Marketing.

As we will see, Content Marketing is anything but new: Content Marketing features a?long history behind it,?it's a tried and true marketing strategy that has been utilized by several brands to successfully build or consolidate their reputation. Though the kinds of content created by brands today are very different from the type of content distributed a hundred years ago, the core concept it still identical.

Why Company uses content marketing?

There are numerous reasons why companies apply content marketing solutions. Basically, these reasons are the identical as in the case of any other marketing practice. It doesn't come as a surprise that practically every company aims at winning customers (or maintaining the existing ones) and, as a result, at increasing the sales of its products and services. All actions?

within marketing are focused on this very objective. Content marketing is not any exception. However, if we assume that generating income is that the objective, we'll easily come to the conclusion that this objective is too obvious and too general. Particularly in the context of the budget of the marketing actions, you want to be perfectly aware of what the money is spent on and what effect you can expect. Precisely defined objectives will are available handy. The main objectives of the marketers who decide to launch content marketing are as follows:

? Increasing brand awareness

? Lead generation

? Converting leads into customers

? Building the image because the industry leader

? Customer engagement

? Customer retention

? Website traffic

? Sales

Depending on the approach, the objectives are often defined more or less precisely. Some marketers agree that generating leads and converting them into customers are completely different actions. However there's a lot of truth in the opinions of those who simply reduce the objectives to three categories:

? Higher sales

? Customer loyalty

? Brand recognition

This list seems familiar, doesn't it? In any case, everybody wants to sell plenty and be recognized within the industry.

Here the key question arises – if the objectives are the identical as the ones of traditional marketing, then why content marketing? No have to look for the answer. Traditional methods don't always correspond to the real needs of the businesses. If you administered a survey checking which of the above marketing objectives are not important for the company, you'd learn that, no matter the industry, company and market size or turnover, everybody wants to sell and be recognized. This is often what we know. We also know that if several companies attempt to win the customer, this is often quite a challenge. Bombarding customers with advertising content is becoming less and fewer effective.?

The human brain becomes resilient not only to the amount of outdoor messages, but also the more or less classic sorts of the display. There are more and more advertisements, but the amount of them noticed by us is dropping.

As customers, we also rebel against spamming (as we see it) in spaces, whether public (a lot of cities introduce restrictions on outdoor advertising, especially within the tourist-attractive district) or private (filters blocking the ads in the internet browsers is a standard) with such messages. Yet, after all, the marketer wants the simplest for us. They only want to let us know?about a new chance which we could otherwise miss. Sort of a hundred other marketers in a hundred other industries.

In consequence, classic marketing often seems to be ineffective, or a minimum of insufficient. In theory , it focuses on the direct message put ahead of the customer, which stands in their way. It aims at stopping them in their tracks even for a flash and forcing them to react to the offer. While reading e-mails from our colleagues, we'd like to filter the promotions, and while visiting our favorite websites, we must search for the content among the aggressive banners. Can it work properly?

Inbound marketing

?It is an alternate – it is based on the assumption that the customers will come to us themselves and get interested in what we offer, if we offer them with interesting content. Rather than irritating them and often misleading them by manipulation with the ad, we make them find us themselves. And it works best if we are ready to offer them access to what they are currently interested in and what they need. It's difficult not to deem this approach ambitious, as effective implementation of content marketing is actually an art. However, the market enforces such actions and for a few time they have already been a typical for many companies.

How are companies running content marketing??

Content marketing is a huge challenge, as it requires a long-term strategy and objectives set in a measurable way (broadly speaking – so that they are consistent with the smart concept definire). The effects are never visible straight away. The contributed work, especially the one connected with the subject matter, involves costs and dedication a lot of hours (after all, we talk about a situation when the customers find us themselves). Additionally, you must be well familiar with internet technology, as even the best content is of no use if we do not secure the issues connected with SEO/SEM. Then how are the companies implementing the content marketing strategies? One of the solutions is acquiring suitable skills within the marketing team (possibly – adding new persons to the team).

A plus of this solution is full control over the whole strategy, whereas the fact that the team must possess very broad skills is a minus. Content marketing requires the constant content generation and it is much more than just preparing the e-mailing. Even such a seemingly simple thing as running the company blog requires not only the subject matter contribution (which is knowledge or the ability to collect the knowledge on the given subject) but also some regularity. It is a mistake to think that you can use content marketing on the side while performing other main marketing actions.

Another solution is to outsource most or all of the actions to an appropriate marketing agency that specializes in designing and creating content marketing actions. A plus of this solution is that the outsourcing of the major resource-consuming elements and transferring them to specialists in generating content. The definite reduction within the control over each of the stages is a minus. An external expert company or freelancer, however, brings such wide experience in running this sort of action that a meticulous control is not necessary and the cost settlement can be based on the effects.

The standard factor is of a significant importance here, as workplace specializing in content marketing must be dedicated to the project in order for the cooperation to be possible and profitable. Hence, running content marketing on the side is out of question. Yet one more solution is to leave the project manager responsible for the strategy implementation within the company while outsourcing partial actions. Freelancers often end up to be good contractors. The control over the full project remains with the employee of the company, whereas the precise actions are allocated to the contractors who are not responsible for the whole project, except for the scope of the commissioned work.

This approach requires a more precise management of the campaign, sticking strictly to the budget, preparing contingency plans and therefore the like. At the identical time the costs can be lower than in the other two cases. Within the first case, we don't have to involve many people from the marketing department in our campaign, and within the second one, we avoid the prices of the service mark-up, which may be significant when we decide to cooperate with a content marketing agency. What are the companies' decisions supported , then? Undoubtedly, the resources matter. There are companies with many employees, during which one person is responsible for marketing.

Therefore, it might be naive to think that this person will be able to cope with another task consisting in designing, creating and launching a content marketing campaign. In some cases, taking over extra employees, whether or not on a temporary basis, are often unprofitable. It's clear that companies make cost-based decisions. Outsourcing is usually cheaper in practice than acting on our own in theory. Plenty of managers underestimate how resource-consuming some creative processes can be. Running a corporation youtube channel requires constant generation of unique content. Although it seems easy at the beginning, the motivation drops after some weeks, especially among those employees who aren't directly connected with the campaign, but possess the required subject matter knowledge (in practice: they generate the content).

Hence, paying experts to handle the small print of the campaign, while concentrating on the most themes on our part, is usually safer, faster and cheaper. The choice about how to carry out the actions connected with content marketing should never be premature. Similarly, all pilot actions must be thoroughly analysed and planned.

The subsequent chapters of this work will surely help you make the right decisions by yourself.

Extra

More inbound approach?

Content marketing is one among the tools of inbound marketing. As we mentioned above, it's a situation where a company strives to draw the attention of potential customers by providing them with quality content. These actions are effective only after a while , because it is not easy to build one loyal group of recipients who we can expect to buy our product. Nevertheless, the businesses applying the inbound solutions are considered as places where the real experts of the industry work. What comes with it's that the customers are more willing to spend their money on organizations that they perceive as professional. For the customer, the very moment of "getting to know" the corporate and its offer is much more pleasant because it comes without the hard sell. Building the corporate image based on inbound marketing is surely an action worth dedicating some time.?

Customer engagement and innovation?

Customer curious about the given subject is an engaged customer. Logically, a person reached by content marketing must be interested in the subject which the content relates to. Interest doesn't mean already a potential purchase, but one that voluntarily subscribes to the company blog is a more valuable lead than a hundred recipients of e-mailing. If our recipients regularly read the contents which we offer, then in their eyes we are the experts and innovators of the industry. This is often decisive when it comes to a purchasing decision. The reach achieved by whisper marketing is an additional gain. People that frequently take part in webinars that we organize, will sooner or later tell their friends about it. Meanwhile, it's hard to count on the recipient of our e-mailing or brochures to become our ambassador.

Search Engine Optimization?(SEO)

Probably everybody heard the mysterious term "seo". It's also commonly known that it involves actions aimed at affecting the processes of content search on the internet in such a way that internet users encounter our content as often as possible. A situation when the customer googles the name of our industry or a term pertaining to it and our website is in the front position of the search results, it seems to be the utmost accomplishment. Obviously, in times of giant competition almost in every sector, it's really difficult to achieve.

There are numerous myths on how suitable website software can help to realize such a result, but the reality is just the opposite. Indeed, an unsuitable preparation of the web site does a lot of harm, but an appropriate one does not help. The right seo actions ensure a good starting position to achieve excellent results, but the latter depend upon the content. Key words, metadata and efficiently and clearly written codes are friendly for the robots whose aim is to guage the usefulness of our website, but this is often not enough to deal with the key issue.

The robots provide a high index to the websites which offer good content. How do they are doing this? They automatically analyze what is on the website. As they're not able to evaluate the content quality in terms of the subject matter, they check whether the visitors forward the content (e. G. By placing a link on a thematic forum or within social media). Because of content marketing, which is predicated on nothing else but creating and publishing interesting content, a static company website can become livelier and increase its index significantly. Development of data culture despite many critical voices pertaining to what can be found on the internet, there's no doubt that if it had not been for the global network, we might have not become a learning society.

The demand for constant development of our skills is enshrined in our times quite ever before. Because it is often informal (school, university or training aren't enough), the worldwide network is an obvious medium. You'll find knowledge in any field here. While applying the content marketing strategies, we become an element of this culture of knowledge as its very important elements – the creators. It's difficult to measure how much this contribution is reflected in the business, but it's equally difficult to underestimate the chance that we get this way in the business of the 21st century.?

Better use of company resources.

In many organizations, knowledge about tools also as resources are wasted. Companies often prepare data for industry reports, but don't always have an idea of how this data can be used beyond the in-company circulation. Meanwhile, if it's properly processed and described, it can constitute an ideal and – most importantly – required white paper. Others willingly apply the tools in video conferences and they do not realize that often a tool used for the purposes of in-company meetings can be useful also as an online seminar tool.

The conclusion is that we will make better use of our knowledge and other resources which we already possess and which in big part have not been used so far. The argument for this type of use will convince everyone – lower operating costs and a better marketing effect. It can't be assumed straight away that content marketing allows creating "something" out of "nothing", but the preparation and launch of a campaign during a way forces us to analyse the resources and think about what we can get out of them and what extra costs we will need to incur.

This manner quite a few managers who were convinced that they perfectly knew their company discovered completely new areas.

To know more about Content Marketing Campaigns, click here.