See past your biases to get to true meaning.
Have marketers become so lame that we need to remind them to include content?
Content marketing is appearing more often in discussions of marketing theory. Initially I found myself annoyed by the term, but I realize now that the advocates of content marketing are on the same page as I am. I may have to become content with content marketing if that’s what everyone wants to call it.
So, why was I annoyed?
From the department-of-redundancy department
Part of my irritation stemmed from the terminology itself. To me content marketing sounds redundant. Doesn’t all marketing have content? Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett, authors of Get Content, Get Customers: Turn Prospects into Buyers with Content Marketing, claim to have coined the term. Although one of the definitions of content is essential meaning or substance,” maybe the authors should precede “content” with “relevant” or “customer-focused.”
Give established theories a new name
Another source of my displeasure was that content marketing sounds to me a lot like nurture marketing, which predates it by about 15 years. I run into a fair number of marketers who are not familiar with the term nurture marketing, but if they changed the word “content” to “nurture,” the Pulizzi-Barrett Website sums up the theory well: “Focus on Content Marketing: Make Customers Smarter and Better Informed.”
We are talking about educational promotion that focuses on helping customers succeed. If we give it a new name, it sounds trendy, and we can sell another book. This is an ongoing problem that gets in the way of intelligent conversation about successful marketing strategy.
OK. We’re marketers and it’s in our blood to give things new names. But at least come up with a term that makes sense!
Ask the marketing god
The Pulizzi-Barrett Website has a cryptic quote from Seth Godin saying that content marketing was the “new marketing.” I emailed Godin and his simple-yet-profound response put the whole situation into perspective for me:
“I guess my point was that saying something worth hearing is important.”
What do you think? Is content marketing really nurture marketing in disguise?
P.S. I will cover content marketing in more detail in a future post.
