It seems like every marketing study or journal article has a new way of categorizing the world of marketing. In the good old days it was pretty clear cut. There was TV, radio, newspaper, print magazines, outdoor and direct mail… simple. Today we have added SEO (organic search); paid search (Pay-per-click); online display (Pay-per-click and impressions); email marketing; mobile and social. Recently content marketing has become a popular category due in large part to the rise of social marketing. While most of these new categories have been fairly well accepted there is potential confusion in how exactly these categories are used. For example, tablets are increasingly considered mobile but depending on the use, tablets sometimes belong more to the world of online computing and sometimes more to the world of mobile carriers.
Social marketing is even more poorly defined. In some cases it refers only to online display ads purchased inside social media. More often it refers to promotional offers that are either generated in a brand site existing inside a social media site or to a promotion or message that has independently found its way into an online social network. In other cases it refers to media like content that originates in a blog or business site first before traveling into social networks. The nebulous origin of these messages creates confusion about how to define what is and what is not social marketing content. Adding “content marketing” to the mix creates even more confusion. I don’t have a magic wand to sort this all out but a deeper look at the emerging trends in digital and social media provides some insight into the real meaning and value of these emerging trends and what it all means for how you should be thinking about how you market your business.
Content marketing roughly applies to any kind of content created with the purpose of indirectly promoting a product or a brand. In 1895 John Deere famously published The Furrow, a magazine showing famers how to become more productive and profitable. The Furrow is still in circulation today. This is an excellent example of how an advertiser can switch hats and actually become the media company. There is no longer any need to include ads or promotions because the articles are promoting the brand by featuring its industry expertise. Of course the media content can include solutions or even feature products and traditional ads can be inserted in the brand owned media featuring the “publishers” products just as if they were advertising in any other media brand.
Another version of this that is quite common is the insertion of brand stories into real media articles. Sometimes this is done without any effort on the part of the advertising brand but frequently this is a collaborative process between the media outlet and the advertiser. In some cases this is obvious to the reader and sometimes it is not. Note that unless there is an obvious attempt to mislead the reader these practices do not violate truth in advertising law.
Many of these kinds of content are simultaneously examples of advertorial content which is generally created by the brand itself but then distributed, sometimes subtly, in traditional media channels. These can be ad spots or commercials that provide information of interest to the consumer with only an indirect connection to the brand itself. Clear cut examples of advertorial content include advertisements written as articles. Another version of advertorial content includes media produced stories that feature multiple brands as in product reviews or rating articles that examine specific industries or industry practices.
A new buzzword has recently appeared describing some of these examples as “native content”; another term that does little to help alleviate the confusion surrounding content and social marketing. Presumably, native content is any content created by either a brand or media company that is integrated into the “native” content produced by the media outlet. You can determine for yourself what examples presented above might fit into this new category but I wouldn’t waste my time.
What matters here is not to establish standards for defining what category best describes a particular piece of content but rather understanding your options when it comes to developing a content strategy for creating and distributing content through an integrated marketing strategy. The tools, techniques and distribution channels for traditional, online, digital or social media all merge together in strange and unpredictable ways making it even more important that you understand the key underlying theories on how content can be designed to a) attract and build audience in online media; and b) play a significant role in the overall marketing and sales process for a particular brand or business.
There are essentially two approaches to creating content. First there is the traditional way of creating an advertisement or promotion designed to immediately generate a lead and second, there is the way of creating advertorial or other media-like content that seeks to build an audience that is “owned” by the brand rather than a third party media site. It is this audience “ownership” that determines the nature of the strategy going forward. When you succeed in building such an audience, your business creates a pool of prospects that is more engaged and interested in potentially doing business with your company. The key here is to first engage with your target market as a media-like entity, providing interesting, informative or even entertaining content which builds a relationship with a potential prospect.
By definition, everyone in your audience is a potential prospect but when you are executing an audience building strategy your first goal is to individuals to audience. In this case the social marketing process is a two step conversion. The first conversion is from unknown person in your target market to an audience member. The second conversion is from an audience member into a prospect. This second conversion is often at the choice and timing of the audience member. That is why this is referred to as “inbound marketing” because rather than inducing a call to action where the individual becomes a prospect, the individual decides for themselves when they want to enter the buying cycle and become a true prospect for your business.
Creating advertorial or other media-like content in order to build an audience that you own changes not only the marketing process but also everything about how you engage and work with individuals you hope to eventually convert to customers. This extends to individual networking and sales efforts where a sales staff is trained to act as a member of your media staff, either as a subject matter expert or consultant, providing information in a media like format. These strategies do not require that you stop selling. They simply require that you fine tune your radar so that you can engage with individuals without trying to sell to them until they signal you that they are interested in becoming a customer or otherwise engage in the sales process. Good sales people have been practicing these techniques for years. Just ask any top performer and they will tell you that they build relationships first and sell only when it is appropriate to do so. Top performers tend to present themselves as subject matter experts so this is by no means a stretch for them. The only thing missing in most cases is a marketing department supporting this effort with appropriate content.
From a marketing point of view this means that you can actually engage your actual customers in the marketing and sales process where they help carry your brand reputation into the community and even actively recruit others to become audience members. Note that this does not require that you ask your customers for referrals. Of course you can do that as part of a separate initiative but here the key request is simply to share content or otherwise ask your customers to invite their friends and colleagues to join your audience. This request is easy to fulfill as there is no sense that they are imposing on others when they share content which is what holds back most people from helping refer prospects to your business.
These simple but powerful concepts in social and content marketing underlie all your social marketing efforts so be sure that you understand the basic principles and create campaigns that are aligned with the natural goals of audience building and inbound marketing. This means that you will naturally segregate promotional offers from your content marketing programs. None of this requires that you become expert in the emerging nomenclature that attempts to define new marketing categories. Your tracking efforts need only be focused on following traditional conversions from prospects to customers or the new form of conversion of an unknown individual to an audience member. Social marketing metrics must include some measurement of your audience size and while these metrics may be more of a “guesstimate” than hard numbers, the measurements should at least indicate the growth rate of your audience. You can calculate a conversion rate of audience to prospect based on your estimated audience size. The numbers may not be 100% right but they don’t need to be as long as you are consistent in how you measure the estimated size of your audience. If your measurements are consistent then so will be your ROI calculations.
In the final analysis the single, most important concept that you should wrap your arms around is the idea that every form of content you create becomes a part of your content graph which extends not only to all the content you distribute online but also to all the content that is distributed into the real world through any other means. This includes traditional media content and also the real world conversations that occur between your professional sales staff and the people they interact with while networking or when otherwise engaged in the sales process. Much of this falls under the heading of brand marketing but ultimately, every word or image that reaches someone in the real world should connect back to your content graph. Sometimes these connections are ephemeral, as when someone reaches through their personal network to find a solution provider or when a lucky meeting occurs during a social event and a conversation unexpectedly leads to a sales call. Whenever possible build real links into your content so that your content graph can function to effectively drive traffic to your best content and ultimately to your website or a sales professional.
If you build good marketing strategies and support them with appropriate content you need not worry so much about what bucket they fall into or what buzz word best describes your efforts, be it native content, advertorial, traditional, online or whatever. Just be clear about the purpose of your content; know how it connects to your overall content graph and be sure that it effectively directs viewers back toward a more valuable piece of content, your website or a sales professional.
