Lets be honest about “Content Marketing”, just for once.
“Content marketing”, was invented so online marketing agencies can sell more stuff.
Yes I realise all my pals or now ex pals in my industry will tell me to STFU. But I have thing little aberration in my brain that sometimes inhibits me from bullshitting. Which is a real handicap at times.
The reason why the term “content marketing” is a bucket full of rotten, frogs is this…..
There is already a term that adequately describes the act, and that is “publishing.” Some of you may be aware of it.
In the first 50 years after Gutenberg first cranked up his printing press (it was no longer Guttenbergs’ by the way as in was in debt to the investor and had to hand all the rights over to the businessman who lent him the money to make the printing press, but that’s a story for another time.) around 12 million books were printed.
Do you think they understood the art of using publishing for marketing purposes using the cutting edge technology of their time.
To me, the term publishing has marketing at its foundation. After all, publishing is simply a collection of communication methods designed to communicate and cause reaction in an engaged consumer.
If you start to peel off the layers of what people are actually doing when they create an infographic, publish it on a blog and promote it using social media, you quickly understand that the fundamentals never change.
All content marketing describes, is a mechanised way of taking advantage of current publishing and promotional tools, it does not get deep into the fundamentals. It simply hasn’t been around long enough, whilst “publishing” as a term has.
This may seem like semantic drivel, but when agencies overuse the term “content marketing” to promote methods using new mechanisms, when the fundamentals are the same, it gets annoying.
My argument is that the client does not need to know the definition of such mechanistic terms as content marketing, that’s for the industry to sweat bricks over.
But the client absolutely has to get what “publishing” is, and the increased speed and power that the technology can now give us.
So I’m not that bothered about using the word, but do you have to use it so much.
And do you really think that a client needs to know such stuff to get it?