A hat tip to Bob Sacks for sharing the referenced post below on Twitter. If you are on Twitter (and why wouldn’t you be?) you should follow him @BoSacks because he posts a wealth of publishing goodies.
I cannot tell you how many articles and blog posts about content marketing I consume each month. Many of them are fluff at best and a few others are anecdotes twisted into all encompassing best practices. So when I came across a post, “Why brands need to avoid the hype surrounding content marketing” in The Guardian by Justin Pearse I was amazed at its brilliance…going straight to what should be the heart of content marketing.
However, to act like a publisher, any content a brand produces must be developed purely to satisfy its consumers’ interests. No media company, from Sky to the Guardian to MTV, produces content to do anything other than enthral their customers.
With all this focus on content marketing there has never been a better time to be a writer. Unfortunately there is very little content being produced that enthralls the reader. But therein lies the even better news. If you are a writer that can enthrall your audience or your client’s audience you are sitting pretty.
Justin says, “Maybe we need to stop calling it content marketing, give it and our customers the respect it deserves and go back to just calling it content?”
I’ve often said that placing the word marketing after everything makes it seem so dirty. Perhaps that’s because marketers insist on pimping these tools. As with social media marketing, it’s no longer about the conversation…it’s about a conversation that drives sales.
There’s nothing wrong with driving sales. It’s only when we start manipulating conversations to do that it becomes “dirty”.
I for one am going to replace all the information I’ve collected over the past months on keys to successful content marketing and just sprawl the word ENTHRALL across my wall. If I focus on that, the rest will fall into place.
What do you think?
Photo: A rather uninspired Cane Corso
Photo Credit: Traci Browne