I’ve heard and read about marketing in general countless times, but not so often about content marketing. After reading the first chapters of Joe Pulizzi’s book "Epic Content Marketing", it was interesting to get a starting point for further research.

Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing valuable and compelling content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience—with the objective of driving profitable customer action.* 

Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with customers and prospects without selling. Instead of pitching products or services, as is typical in traditional marketing, the core goal of content marketing is to deliver information that makes our buyers more intelligent or perhaps entertaining them to build an emotional connection. The essence of Content Marketing strategy is the belief that if we, as businesses, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty.

That goal would be to build an audience, one that loves our content so much that it leads to subscription.

Considering content marketing principles, brands should produce longerform, higher-quality content and build audiences on their own sites—they should become true media publishers. But the rewards and results would be arguably more powerful. Joe Pulizzi states that brands can engage more deeply with their customers through content marketing efforts, and by driving consumers to its own website's valuable content.

At the center of making all that happen, as Pulizzi highlights, is storytelling. Brands are creating helpful, valuable, and compelling stories that position them as trusted experts in their fields. That worthy content should convert casual, passersby readers into loyal ones. In turn, those loyal readers then convert into loyal customers.

Content is just . . . content, unless it’s driving behavior change in your customers and prospects. Then it’s called “content marketing."*

What makes content marketing different from simple content is that content marketing must do something for the business. It must inform, engage, or amuse with the objective of driving profitable customer action. Our content may engage or inform, but if it’s not accomplishing our business goals it’s not content marketing. The content we create should work directly to attract and/or retain customers in some way.

Good content marketing makes a person stop, read, think, and behave differently.*

I briefly highlighted some basic aspects of Content Marketing that caught my attention while I was trying to get more detailed insight into the topic. The book "Epic Content Marketing" definitely opens up many other questions and gives a detailed overview of content marketing practice.

As I went through the chapters, another topic caught my attention, that of online marketing and the role of social media in content marketing. Consequently, a few more questions raised up: Is social media marketing also content marketing? How to use social media to improve content marketing results? But maybe that is a topic for another blogpost and further discussion!

* Quotes by Joe Pulizzi 

Source: Pulizzi, J. (2014). Epic Content Marketing. McGraw-Hill Education