Con­tent Mar­ket­ing as a mar­ket­ing dis­ci­pline has had a mete­oric rise in adop­tion, and today I heard an inter­est­ing thought, will we one day drop the ‘mar­ket­ing’ from ‘con­tent mar­ket­ing plat­form’?. It’s a genre of soft­ware that Linkdex has an inter­est in.

Recent­ly, I’ve been think­ing about what con­tent means to us as mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als, what it means to con­sumers, and what the word itself means in the hypoth­e­sis pro­posed. So here’s what I think:

• Con­tent is the very fab­ric of the web.
• Con­tent is what we write, but also what is writ­ten and pub­lished about us by oth­ers.
• Con­tent is what we search for, share, link to, and book­mark.
• Con­tent is what we judge a com­pa­ny by, reward­ing them with mar­ket­ing buzz­words like affin­i­ty, pos­i­tive sen­ti­ment and brand equi­ty.
• Con­tent is what can be rel­e­vant and use­ful for­ev­er or just sec­onds.
• Con­tent is what has the pow­er to dig­i­tal­ly trans­form orga­ni­za­tions in a good or bad way.
• Con­tent is what tells con­sumers a sto­ry, and what says more about a brand than any advert.
• Con­tent is what con­sumers inter­act with when want­i­ng to engage with you, all the way through the con­sumer jour­ney. That includes whether they are infor­ma­tion seek­ing, list build­ing, eval­u­at­ing, bar­gain hunt­ing or hav­ing post pur­chase needs.
• Con­tent is what either deliv­ers enor­mous ROIs, or, can just be expen­sive words and pic­tures that nev­er get read.

So what choice do we have other than doing it well? Really well!

If that’s Con­tent, what is ‘mar­ket­ing’ and how does that dif­fer from ‘con­tent strat­e­gy’?

Let’s go for the Wikipedia def­i­n­i­tion of mar­ket­ing first:

“Mar­ket­ing is a wide­ly used term to describe the com­mu­ni­ca­tion between a com­pa­ny and the con­sumer audi­ence that aims to increase the val­ue of the com­pa­ny or its mer­chan­dise or, at its sim­plest, rais­es the pro­file of the com­pa­ny and its prod­ucts in the pub­lic mind. The pur­pose of mar­ket­ing is to induce behav­ioral change in the recep­tive audi­ence.”

No sur­pris­es that this def­i­n­i­tion is very con­sumer cen­tric. Putting your cus­tomer at the cen­ter of mar­ket­ing is what we’re taught from the get go.

It there­fore makes sense that Con­tent Mar­ket­ing relates to two con­cepts: consumer jour­neys and moments.

How do you feel about my def­i­n­i­tion of Con­tent Mar­ket­ing?

“Con­tent Mar­ket­ing is the process of plan­ning, cre­at­ing, pub­lish­ing, pro­mot­ing and mea­sur­ing the con­tent that allows brands to be present in the moments you’d be expect­ed to be present through­out the con­sumer jour­ney.”

Want to change anything?

It would fol­low that suc­cess for con­tent would be mea­sured in your abil­i­ty to under­stand the con­sumer jour­ney, moments, and your abil­i­ty to be present at those moments. Whether that’s a con­sumer look­ing for an infor­ma­tive resource or want­i­ng the sto­ry that breaks today and is yes­ter­day’s news tomor­row.

In organ­ic search (a huge dri­ver of demand for great con­tent) most cam­paigns would fail this stress test. Most brands don’t map key­words to a con­sumer jour­ney, under­stand the top­ics that need to be cov­ered and the rel­a­tive demand at each stage. It then becomes impos­si­ble to mea­sure suc­cess.

Con­tent strat­e­gy feels very dif­fer­ent. It sits above mar­ket­ing. It’s busi­ness wide and not just about con­sumers. It involves all stake­hold­ers. These will include staff, sup­pli­ers and investors.

Which gives us an addi­tion­al point:

• Con­tent is also what organ­i­sa­tions con­sume with­in to com­mu­ni­cate to staff, sup­pli­ers and investors.

So for busi­ness­es there’s con­tent strat­e­gy that results in con­tent, some of which will be used by mar­ket­ing.

Back to the question in hand…

Will we end up drop­ping the ‘mar­ket­ing’ out of ‘con­tent mar­ket­ing plat­form’?

I think for soft­ware plat­forms that are designed around, plan, pub­lish, pro­mote and mea­sure con­tent mod­els, we could. How­ev­er, the core use case of these plat­forms is mar­ket­ing. As a mar­keter would I want to buy a ‘con­tent plat­form’ or a ‘con­tent mar­ket­ing plat­form’ if what I want­ed was to get more eye­balls to con­tent that helped me sell more prod­uct?

The space is cur­rent­ly occu­pied by ven­dors like Scrib­ble Live, Per­co­late, and News­cred but it is hot­ting up. SEO plat­forms like Linkdex are play­ing in the same space but are more chan­nel spe­cif­ic, and there’s going to be a lot of new entrants. The need to do con­tent mar­ket­ing well is too busi­ness crit­i­cal, and too valu­able for it not to get even more com­pet­i­tive.

I’m hap­py to watch the space and the evo­lu­tion of cat­e­gories and labels. What I do think is the “Con­tent is …” state­ments I made ear­li­er, will still be true either way, and our job as mar­keters set out in my pro­posed def­i­n­i­tion remains unchanged.

We just need to get bet­ter at doing it.