- A credit card would become the go-to source for all things small business management-related
- A software vendor would publish more articles (and draw more audience) than many B2B publishers, every day
- A respected CMO would write in a blog post “I had become…a “press release CMO” – pedigreed, gray haired, and no longer relevant in a marketing world turned upside down.”
- Dozens of business titles would consider it a priority to help advertisers produce compelling stories for them to publish
- The definitive guide to just about anything business-related would 9 times out of 10 be written by a business itself
- A random marketer would wonder how to publish 170 of their business line employees simultaneously
- More and more B2B businesses would consider the success of the content they publish as synonymous with sales success.
- Markets are conversations
- Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors
- Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
- The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
- Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
- People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors.
- Companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.
- How many people practicing content marketing commission work with a greater focus on demographic targets than speaking to real live human beings?
- How many businesses’ blog posts are devoid of relevant hyperlinks (aside from hyperlinks to other parts of their own site)?
- How many pieces of content are published that still sound like a pitch? A dog-and-pony show?
- How many people have adopted the tactics and best practices of content marketing, but neglect its very foundations?
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Bryon Thomas April 4th, 2013
And even VCs are getting in on the content marketing conversation. Take this post from Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures a couple days ago.
Content Marketing: “…moving the message from a banner to your brand and changing the engagement from a view to a conversation. It also helps that this approach works better on mobile where we are spending more and more of our time every day.”
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/04/content-marketing-simplified.html
Ryan Skinner April 4th, 2013
Saw that one.
When you’ve been working with this for half a decade, you watch with a kind of wide-eyed curiosity as the rest of the world discovers it. Fred Wilson evangelizing the thing I do? Unreal.
I welcome content marketing’s adolescence (I think we’ll see content marketing’s principles bleed into everything digital marketing, as we’re seeing it impact advertising via what’s called “native advertising”).
We’re getting all grown up, in a hurry.
Doug Kessler April 4th, 2013
Love this post. When you catalog all that’s changed so far it really is head-spinning stuff.
And it’s only the beginning.