Frienemies: Content Marketing and Your Marketing Strategy

Marketing professionals everywhere have begun to realize that they now have a completely different job description than when they started in the field fifteen or twenty years ago. One such professional is Chris Hession, a senior marketing manager at AutoCAD. As he told Social Media Examiner, “Just in the last year and a half, social media has become not just a component of our product marketing plan, but really the core component” (Source: SocialMediaExaminer.com). His statement highlights the new prominence of content marketing.

Understanding the Content Marketing Paradigm

From social media posts to blog conversations, marketing paradigms have shifted from traditional push marketing, in which potential customers are handed static sales messages, to the more nuanced content marketing.

As marketing buzzwords go, “content marketing” is a phrase that’s frequently used but rarely defined. Perhaps a succinct definition would be “the art of branding and subtle persuasion by means of providing buyers with the information, community or entertainment that they seek.”

Is Content Marketing Good… or Bad?

One might wonder, “Is content marketing really all that great? After all, isn’t it just an invitation for an even heavier deluge of mediocre Internet content? Isn’t it worse, in a certain sense, to be subtly manipulated by content marketing than blatantly sold to with push marketing?”

Yes, content marketing requires more time than push marketing ever did. Yes, attempting to create popular, viral social / website content is inevitably a risky proposition. However, asking whether content marketing is good or bad is almost akin to asking if it’s good or bad that a horse has four legs. Like it or not, content marketing is here to stay; businesses would be wise to embrace the new paradigm sooner rather than later.

Content Marketing Statistics

A recent BlueGlass Interactive infographic reveals just how important content marketing has become. Here are a few statistics:

• 90% of B2B marketers are using some type of content marketing
• 60% of B2B marketers plan to increase their investment in content marketing in 2012
• Posting articles is the most popular form of content marketing by B2B marketers, followed by social media and blogs
• More than a quarter of total marketing dollars spent by B2B marketers went towards content marketing

(Source: Mashable.com)

What about you? How is your business embracing content marketing? How has it changed the way you promote your products or services? Share your experiences in the comments section.

Infographic Source: Mashable

Return to top: The Content Marketing Explosion: Friend or Foe?

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