There’s something strange going on with content marketing
As the International Content Marketing Summit kicks off today, Raymond Snoddy asks if this new trend is really different enough to declare itself a new species of communication – and stumbles on some troubling questions.
Do you sometimes fear that by the time you manage to get your mind around a new idea it must already be hopelessly passé – like finally hearing The Killing is good just as the third series is coming to its climax?
It feels a bit like that about content marketing. The concept has been gradually rising on the tide for several years until this autumn it seems to have exploded into a deluge of conferences and seminars in London.
It’s no different in the US where there were at least 14 content marketing conferences, it was said, that no marketeer could afford to miss this year – everywhere from San Francisco and Las Vegas to Chicago and Minneapolis.
It’s clearly the Big Marketing idea of 2013, or at least is being marketed as such.
And yet at the same time there are signs of something strange going on. People still rush to provide definitions of what content marketing actually is, as if they are trying to convince themselves of the validity of what they are talking about.
Perhaps most revealing of all was a recent review of the ‘Top 7 Content Marketing Trends‘ that will dominate 2014 by Jayson DeMers for Forbes.
The number one trend? It was that businesses would finally be able to define content marketing. There are also similar definitional issues over Native Advertising but let’s not go there.
And trend number two, for the record, was that the top new marketing job title would be ‘head of content’ and those companies that did not assign content creation and dissemination in this way to specific people and departments would, in some unspecified way, seriously lose out.
Some of this content creation has, of course, existed for decades in the form of staff and customer magazines produced by airlines or retailers – many of them of high quality. A small business, which usually came out of the marketing department, has often lay partly hidden under the title of contract publishing.
As with many new or newly defined ideas, true believers emerge who may push a modestly useful concept a tad too far.”
Clearly things have changed with the arrival of everything from citizen journalism and blogs to the unstoppable rise of social media. So maybe it does make sense to try to bring things together; to try to define and focus the combined established media and all the new flows of information.
Is it different enough, however, to declare content marketing a new species of communication and view the concept as a talisman leading its devotees towards a new promised land of marketing?
Joe Pulizzi, who founded the Content Marketing Institute and may have been one of the first to use the term, admits to as many as 19 definitions covering the activity in the past – all the way from custom publishing to corporate journalism and branded media.
In his new book Epic Content Marketing, which is so current the copyright date is given as 2014, Pulizzi says content marketing is the art of communicating to customers and prospects “without selling”.
It is non-interruption marketing and instead of pitching products or services you build an emotional connection by offering intelligent or entertaining content to your customers and win their trust and money that way.
Above all else, the theory goes, compelling content cuts through the endless clutter and everything else gets skipped or ignored.
We are getting to the heart of the matter here but the trouble is that, as with many new or newly defined ideas, true believers emerge who may push a modestly useful concept a tad too far.
At The Content Avalanche, the B2B marketing conference this month, Philip Martin, head of marketing at Amadeus, advised: “Make content good enough so you don’t have to do advertising. If your content is interesting enough your audience will share it, making advertising unnecessary.”
Maybe.
You also hear other senior voices in this space boasting proudly about never watching television or reading or seeing ads.
Which of course makes it very odd that the marketing industry has been prepared, according to GroupM, to pay a record £14 billion for advertising this year. Perhaps not all of them have heard of content marketing yet and there may even be something still in the old fashioned idea of overtly selling to customers.
If there is something in content marketing – and of course there is once the froth and the exaggerated claims have been scraped off – then journalism might be at the centre of it.”
This week’s International Content Marketing Summit – when did every common or garden conference start calling itself a Summit? – features “the world’s top experts in content marketing” who will reveal “the strategies and secrets of their phenomenally successful campaigns.”
Except that prominent in the CMA’s list of case studies can be found the Asda magazine and Northstar, the Audi magazine. Hmmm…customer magazines, again.
A rather more focused approach was evident in a seminar held earlier this month by Raconteur, the publisher of serious advertising-supported supplements for papers such as The Times, and NewsCred, the US company which licences the use of high quality content from the top levels of the established media with 4,000 ‘fully licensed sources’. The company also uses curation technology and an editorial team to create ‘content experiences’ for select audiences.
It addressed a fascinating issue: the role of journalism in content marketing.
If there is something in content marketing – and of course there is once the froth and the exaggerated claims have been scraped off – then journalism might be at the centre of it. (To declare an interest I chaired the session.)
The underlying idea was that any old content will not fulfil the mission of content marketing – only top quality content. And who on the whole produces top quality content…
As Gideon Spanier, media editor of the Evening Standard, argued: Every company is a media company now and needs a head of content, that a journalist mindset matters, and don’t ignore the continuing power of print.
Trebles all round. New opportunities are opening up all the time for hard-pressed journalists providing sparkling copy for expanding content marketeers.
Except for a couple of niggling questions. How far are corporates prepared to go to open up their channels to truly independent content?
And surely there will be problems surrounding potential conflicts of interest for journalists.
As Anne Godfrey, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, noted at the session in the Savoy, she would be very cautious about hiring a journalist for a CIM content marketing commission who at other times wrote about the affairs of the Institute.
But as journalists are good at getting to the heart of the matter, let’s quickly agree it’s the content rather than the concept that’s important here.