Content marketing is one of the hottest topics in the digital marketing field. But what is content marketing really? What is the best definition of content marketing? The most commonly accepted definition is the one proposed by the Content Marketing Institute, which reads as follows:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a defined audience and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
A strategic content marketing approach implies the commitment of a company to build a relationship with its customers and its market through the production and distribution of content. It is worth focusing on this definition, which is extremely concise yet quite comprehensive, as it touches on all relevant aspects of this marketing approach.
A Strategic Approach
The first point of the definition specifies that content marketing is a strategic marketing approach. It concerns the role the brand chooses to have in the market and the way it decides to tell its story. This is why content marketing myst be consistently integrated with all the other communication channels.
The term “strategy” is often abused or misused, especially in the fields of business and marketing, but in its proper meaning, it refers to a long-term action plan aimed at defining and coordinating a series of actions to achieve a specific goal.
The first characteristic of content marketing is that it must be planned as a long-term activity. Not a “campaign” or a set of campaigns with specific objectives, but a continuous activity that must accompany the development and growth of the brand and its business over time.
Another characteristic of a strategic project is clarity in defining the objective. In the act of designing a content marketing plan, it is necessary to clarify the way it can contribute to the business goals of the company and how it should integrate with all the other actions taken to communicate its message to the potential audience.
Content is King
Content is the story you intend to tell. It has been twenty-five years since Bill Gates wrote the famous article titled “Content is King” on the Microsoft blog. A sentence that has become a mantra, quoted millions of times in articles, books, presentations. Actually, the original sentence was not coined by Gates but about a year earlier by the entrepreneur Sumner Redstone.
However, Bill Gates contextualized it in his article by stating:
“content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the internet.”
It’s curious how the founder of the world’s most important technology company, the company that had built its success on an operating system for personal computers, did not see technology in itself, but content as the future gold. And it’s curious that even today, many refer to the internet world as a predominantly technological world, when technology is actually just an enabling factor (albeit very important) for what is the real fuel of the network: content.
Valuable Content
Any piece of information, in any form, can be considered “content”. But what do we expect to be valuable content? Content is a structured piece of information. Content can take different forms depending on its nature: written text, image, video, audio, but also, for example, a mathematical formula. What makes it peculiar is its usefulness to the user. Content must therefore provide information that increases the value of the system (the user must recognize the content as having a value greater than the energy spent finding it or the time the consumption required).
The value of content is naturally subjective: different users could attribute the different value to the same piece of content. Even a content that with an objective intrinsic value (say, a Nobel prize level physics article) could be considered of no value by readers who cannot decipher it. This is why the issue of defining the audience is very important, as we will discuss later.
Content can also take on very different value connotations: it can be rational (content that provides unknown information, better organized or easier to consume) or emotional (it can make people cry, laugh, entertain, fascinate).
However, to be functional to its objectives, content must not only convey value but must also be relevant to the audience it addresses and must be consistent with the message the brand conveys or with the image it wants to project of itself.
Attract and Retain
The main purpose of content marketing is to build and consolidate the relationship with the company’s audience. The content must therefore attract users. In planning content marketing actions, it is necessary to study the audience and always keep in mind what they want and what their real interests are. To be attractive, content must not be promotional or advertising: the content must not talk about the brand and its products or services, and if it does, it must do so very discreetly. Few attitudes raise barriers and reduce trust like that of the seller who tries in every way to push his goods. Content marketing must instead guide the customers and bring them closer to the brand’s world in a smooth and natural way. Content must speak their language and show interest for the readers.
People are naturally attracted by those who tell interesting things and do so without ulterior motives. They are much less attracted by those who only talk about themselves and those who try in every way to put themselves at the center of attention. Giving value to your audience, showing yourself interesting and competent, means establishing a relationship of trust, paving the way for a lasting relationship.
A Defined Audience
The language of marketing is largely borrowed from the military. The audience to be reached for communication initiatives has always been called “the target”. This is because the classical conception of marketing thinks of the audience as a target to hit with one’s message, preferably repeating the shots, in order to break the resistance of the victim, who in the end, it is hoped, will yield and buy something.
When doing content marketing, we do not talk about targets but about the audiences because the dynamic we seek to trigger is reversed. Content is an inbound marketing technique, a process in which it is the customer who autonomously approaches the brand and its message.
However, this does not exempt marketers from the need to study their audience, to understand its composition, attitudes, interests, and methods of consumption and interaction with content. On the contrary, this is one of the fundamental moments in planning a content marketing activity. Defining the characteristics of one’s audience is necessary to build the plan, to select content, and the methods to propose them. Unlike outbound marketing (advertising, for example) which tends to achieve better results if it reaches customers in the most advanced phase of the buyer’s journey, content can address a much wider range, effectively including customers who are still in the evaluation phase, or who are even relatively distant from the brand and its category.
It is very important, however, to know who you are talking to, in what relationship they are with the brand or its market, and in which phase of their approach they are. The value of content is not objective and absolute but can change depending on the attitude, skills, and interests of the user. So you need to know how to say the right things to the right people.
Generating Profit
Finally, content marketing is an investment: like all marketing activities, it involves costs and must be evaluated based on its contribution to company profits and therefore its ROI. The contribution of content marketing to the business can be evaluated in different ways depending on the strategic role assigned to it. It could be direct (lead generation or sales by new customers attracted by content) or indirect (increased awareness or brand qualification, which generates greater credibility or improves positioning and increases the likelihood of purchase or customer loyalty).
To correctly measure the contribution of content marketing to business results, it is necessary to have a very clear objective assigned to it in relation to one’s audience and in relation to other marketing actions undertaken. The variables that can be considered are diverse: organic traffic generated, quality of consumption (dwell time, interaction, sharing), number of leads generated directly or indirectly (often content represents the first touchpoint of a longer journey).
