Content is King but most people in the digital marketing world don’t seem to have a clue as to why. I can only make that observation based on what I read on their blogs and in their forums.
The content marketing that everyone talks about these days is just spam. All you’re doing is publishing articles for the sake of attracting links and increasing advertising page views.
Real content marketing creates demand. What demand are you creating when you “publish high quality content to become an expert”? As Wikipedia has shown us, you don’t need to create high quality content to become an expert — but then, there isn’t much demand for any given Wikipedia article.
Publishing a lot of content has built brand value since the Web first began. That is not content marketing — that is just being a Website. People are going to come back if they like what they see on your site and see a lot of fresh content.
How Digital Content Marketing Really Works
Here is an example of content marketing in a digital context. Let’s say you are releasing a link analysis tool. Everyone will roll their eyes because there are already so many on the market. All the people who know and like link analysis tools have picked their favorites. They may give your tool a trial run.
You’re just trying to carve a piece out of an established market pie. You don’t use content marketing to reach these people — they are already demanding the product or service you have; they just may not be buying yours.
Instead, you need to look beyond the established marketplace. Content marketing grows a market, not market share.
So you have to put together content that is targeted at people who are NOT aware of link analysis, have no interest in it, and don’t demand it.
This targeted content must be placed in front of those people, not in front of the existing marketplace. If you’re writing for the people who are already buying the kinds of products and services you produce then you’re not engaged in content marketing.
There Is Hardly Any SEO Benefit to Content Marketing
This may come as a shock to you, but if you focus on creating demand for your business you’re not going to be optimizing for search. Now, it’s true that I have always maintained that the query is the brand. That is, you exercise your greatest SEO power in creating new queries that people search for — queries where your content is placed first.
That sounds an awful darned lot like what I just said Content Marketing is supposed to be, right? But unless you have an extremely exclusive brand space (virtually no competition), when you create demand you’re not just creating demand for your brand queries. You’re also creating demand for generic, non-branded queries. And if you have a lot of competition in those queries you’re not likely to realize much useful traffic from them.
So stimulating demand is not the same as creating brand-dominated query spaces. Stimulating demand is marketing and creating brand-dominated query spaces is optimizing for search. Now, let me make this clear before everyone spits up their soup: I am not saying that these are the only things that fall into these categories. Marketing involves research, and consumer engagement, and yadayadayada. And SEO includes conceptualization, research, analysis, and yadayadayada.
Content marketing is not, cannot be, and never will be an efficient SEO strategy. If you’re really selling content marketing services you need to downplay the SEO benefits because they just are not there.
Content Marketing is a True Reflective Strategy
Reflective marketing is not the most efficient way to build traffic. It provides you with safety nets to guard against becoming too dependent upon any one channel (such as Google). But reflective marketing also helps to grow a market — at least when it creates new consumer awareness and demand.
You can engage in reflective marketing through engagement and research without distributing content at all. So let’s not make the mistake of equating content marketing with reflective marketing.
Content marketing works when it delivers a coherent message. It works best when it delivers a message that is relevant to a new audience, one that doesn’t get the lingo, an audience that has never heard all the endless repetition of established marketplace mythologies, acronyms, and buzzwords.
Think of all those “introduction to SEO” articles that beginning digital marketers write. They usually publish these articles in marketing forums or on their own blogs (or in article marketplaces). In other words, they write what could have been useful for a content marketing strategy and waste that content on trying to carve a niche out of an existing marketplace.
Don’t explain the basic concepts to an informed audience. They won’t be impressed. Instead, find an uninformed audience that has a reason to seek out your products and services — but don’t run around the Internet creating spam. People don’t respond well to invasive marketing.
Even So-Called Content Marketing Experts Get It Wrong
A recent Forbes article provides this misguided quotation:
…Content marketers … fulfill existing demand for information by staking out specific keyword queries, and creating content that’s most likely to get found when people search those terms….
That is just plain bullshit. John Deere — the company credited with inventing content marketing over 100 years ago — did not waste its time and resources on “fulfilling existing demand”.
If you’re telling people that you use content marketing to “fulfill existing demand” you need to get out of the content marketing business because you have no clue as to what you are talking about. We obviously cannot depend on Forbes to tell the story right because their columnists are writing more about WHO they know than WHAT they should know.
Our digital marketing industry is filled with self-promotional schmucks. Some of these people have made millions of dollars by selling dreams to other people. You can tell the difference between a self-promotional schmuck and a real expert not by how much money the schmuck makes from selling his guides and webinars to people who don’t know any better but by how successful he makes other people regardless of how much they pay him.
Experts have a legitimate business incentive not to share everything they know for free. In fact, people who share everything they know tend to be expert in nothing, although they can be very popular. Why wouldn’t they be popular? They’re spitting out everything they can with no real sense of proprietary investment in what they call their business knowledge. Who would turn down free advice and tips on the Internet?
The people most determined to explain content marketing to you, me, and everyone else — the ones who raise their hands every time someone yells out, “Is there a content marketer in the room?” — are essentially know-nothings who make it up as they go along. You can see this by comparing their content marketing principles to the principles of real content marketing that have been used for over 100 years.
If you’re lucky, these idiots will say something so obviously unclever and stupid — such as “content marketing fulfills existing demand” — that only the most determined, desperate fool demanding to be separated from their money will pay any attention to what such an expert has to say.
To Establish Your Content Marketing Credibility, Do Some Real Content Marketing
Before you’re qualified to sell (or teach) content marketing expertise to the digital marketing world you need to go out and sell digital marketing to people who have:
- Never heard of digital marketing
- Can benefit from digital marketing
- Are willing to read about digital marketing
- Have the means to take advantage of it
Now, if you’re concerned that maybe the world is saturated with explanations and sales pitches for digital marketing, don’t sit there and whine about your lack of opportunity.
Think of something for which you can do some actual content marketing.
If you just want to slap together a PDF or infographic that repeats all the nonsense that your favorite digital marketing gurus have already published without learning what real content marketing is, you have a short career ahead of you before you turn to a new spam technique.
90% of Digital “Content Marketing” is Just Webspam
Maybe I am being too generous in giving the benefit of the doubt to content marketers. After all, there is no proof that the remaining 10% of “content marketing” is doing anything to create demand.
It’s not like many people in our industry did their homework. You have the full power of the Internet at your hands and when it came time to learn about “content marketing” all you did was attend an SEO conference or read some blogger’s self-promotional gunk.
Had there been a real widespread backlash against all the nonsense that has been written about “content marketing” over the past two years we would know that people really do their homework and dig deep. But the sheeple in our industry do what sheeple do: they Retweet links to articles, they say “great post” in the comments, they write their own nonsense articles explaining what content marketing is to other sheeple, and they eventually promote themselves as being expert in content marketing.
If I had to make a wager, I would bet that 99% of all of today’s digital content marketers have never engaged in any real content marketing while knowing what it was or with the intention of actually doing that.
I have to allow for some small percentage because, frankly, there ARE digital marketers who helped to grow the marketplace by introducing digital marketing to new audiences. But that number exceeds the number of digital marketers who understood at the time that they were using content marketing as a strategy to create demand and grow a market.
Everyone else just did it by accident because it felt right. We got lucky.
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90% of Digital “Content Marketing” is Just Webspam – where did that stat come from? Or just based on experience?
Cheers
Patrick, it is a purely anecdotal, subjective, biased observation on my part based on the numerous “how to use content marketing” articles I have read or scanned over the past year. I am, in fact, rounding down as I have — to date — only come across two articles that actually explain what content marketing really is.
All the people who have turned to content marketing because “links no longer work” are just creating a new kind of Webspam.