(and what others are ignoring) is the tremendous value that exists in creating, managing, and publishing valuable content — not as a complete replacement for advertising, but rather as an additional component of the overarching business strategy. In other words, they’re not looking to replace advertising with content — they’re evolving their content to make advertising better.
So, Where’s the Beef?
The general tenor of these content-marketing-as-a-bullshit-buzzword articles boils down to what I call the “you suck at it ” argument: Basically, they assert that media companies can create awesome content, but brands can’t (or won’t) manage this; thus their conclusion is that content marketing itself doesn’t work.
Content Marketing is difficult to do well, let alone at the level of scale enterprise brands typically expect to be achievable. In fact, at CMI we've found that brands often achieve success with their content only after they've done one (or both) of the following two things:
1. They’ve committed to content marketing as a strategic initiative, investing in the business process and developing capable in-house talent (a la GE’s investment in Thomas Kellner, a former Forbes reporter and Columbia School of Journalism graduate, as their managing editor for GE Reports).
2. Alternately, they acquired an already-successful media property — for example, L’Oreal’s initial purchase of Makeup.com, Arrow Electronics' acquisition of United Technical Publishing or even Johnson & Johnson’s purchase of BabyCenter.com. (Of note is that J&J acquired BabyCenter in 2001 for $10 million; or about three-tenths of one percent of their current advertising budget.
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What was it Joni Mitchell said?
"You don’t know what you’ve got - Til it’s gone."
Trust me . . . the one thing everybody seems to agree upon today is that trust is gone – or at least rapidly vanishing – and boy, do we now know that we’d got it. (Or whatever; I can’t keep up with Joni’s grammar.)
Just in the last few months we’ve seen:
“The Trust Crisis” (Harvard Business Review)
“The Trust Crisis in business” (Forbes)
“There is a global crisis of trust” (Salesforce)
Oh my god! A crisis in trust! We’ve got to react:
“Rebuilding trust in business” (University of Oxford)
“The business of rebuilding trust” (PwC Australia)
“Trust: How to rebuild brand authenticity” (Skip Prichard)
What's a marketing person to do?
Content Marketing To The Rescue!
Here are two other things we know: First, a general decline in brand trust becomes utterly devastating as data regulations and shifting consumer attitudes about privacy institute a battle among firms for increasingly scarce and therefore more precious personal data. In this environment of “beg data,” consumer trust will be the decisive factor separating the data “haves” from the “have nots.”
"The only difference between a rut and a grave is the dimensions."
- Ellen Glasgow
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