Everything is content. From the very article you are reading to white papers to YouTube videos, it is all content. However, if everything is content, does that not imply that everything is content marketing? The answer to that question is no. While all content has objectives, and content marketing without an objective is foolishness, there are many nuances that distinguish content marketing from other forms of marketing.
The goal of content marketing is to inform your audience, to become a resource for more than just a product. You are not merely telling them that you have a fantastic new service that is going to make their lives easier if only they fork over some of their hard-earned dollars. You are giving them your expertise (usually for free) that, over time, will likely make them as much of an expert as you are. However, the unspoken statement underlying your content is ‘you could read up and try to apply this yourself, or you can hire the people who already have this knowledge and save yourself lots of time’. Well, guess in our case, it is now a spoken statement.
However, there are many forms of marketing out there, and content marketing is just one more drop in that vast ocean of marketing tactics. What separates content marketing from all of these other forms of marketing? What are the strengths and weaknesses compared to these other forms of marketing?
Content Marketing Characteristics
There are many traits that distinguish content marketing from other forms of marketing. We will go over each of these traits in turn. Those features include flexibility, value to the reader, and permanence.
Flexibility
Out of all existing forms of marketing, content marketing is the most flexible. Content may be presented in any form that the advertiser determines is necessary for achieving their current marketing objectives. It is not just the flexibility in the types of content, but in the way you distribute that content. Rather than confining yourself to specific platforms or timeslots, you are free to distribute the content as you please because the content is yours.
While you want to avoid duplicate content, nothing bars you from sending out a useful document via e-mail, then publishing that same documentation on your website, then promoting it on social media. This allows you to adapt to the market, and let your content go where your users are.
Value to the Reader
This is the most important aspect of content marketing. A good campaign will deliver high value to the reader, making it so that they do not just tolerate consuming your content: they want to consume it. A good content marketing campaign will offer consistent, regular value to the reader in the form of information, or even amusement. As a consequence, a well-executed content marketing campaign will not only be accepted by your target audience, they will seek out this content and share it with friends.
With other forms of advertising like website banner ads, even if you have impressions that does not mean you are getting sales. In fact, it is hard to measure how many true “impressions” an advertisement has received. Sure, you can count how often it was loaded on a person’s web browser, but who is to say the person even saw it? I recall seeing a heat tracking that chart for a web page that had banner ads in the columns and it showed how people were all over the content, but ignored the banners.
Great content offers great value to its reader, and the reader will consume it without any additional prodding. This is one of the factors that makes content marketing stand out from the rest.
Permanence
Most forms of marketing are temporary, ephemeral things. They last only for the duration of a timeslot on TV, or for as long as there is money in your pay-per-click account. This means, no matter how great your ad is, if your market does not show up to view it at the exact time it is made available, they may never see it. This frustration is something that content marketing does not have to deal with, especially in the online space.
Every piece of content produced, as I have stated before, lasts forever. Admittedly this is something of a double-edged sword: if your content is bad, your humiliation is eternal. However, if you do it right, this means that content will continue to deliver conversions throughout its entire life. There is still a “maximum effective lifespan” for any piece of content you create: people are not going to go digging for a ten-year-old article unless it happened to go viral. Regardless, so long as people find your content relevant, they will keep sharing it, giving it exposure far beyond what other forms of marketing can deliver.
Content Marketing and Other Marketing Forms
While knowing the hallmarks of content marketing is important, one must understand how it is different from the other forms of marketing that exist on today, and where its strengths and weaknesses lie. To help with this, we will compare content marketing briefly to Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and traditional marketing channels such as television.
Content Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing
There is a whole lot of overlap between content marketing and social media. In fact, social media is an essential component of any content marketing strategy. Social media should be one of the primary methods by which you distribute content. However, you will sometimes be doing things with social media that do not tie into a content marketing campaign (such as customer service and responding to tweets). By the same token, you will sometimes have content that, while engaging, does not fit with any of the social media platforms you have a presence on (whitepapers being a good example). Here are the strengths and weaknesses of social media as it relates to content marketing:
Strengths:
- Dynamic and able to rapidly disseminate information as it becomes available
- Rapid response and instant feedback
- Flexible: supports a wide variety of content
- Shareable: good posts can be shared by your audience with a single mouse click
Weaknesses:
- Greater time sensitivity: easy for a tweet sent at the wrong time to get lost in the newsfeeds of your audience
- Lots of noise – everybody is on social media, making it difficult to stand out.
- Some platforms are more specialized or require unique approaches compared to others, increasing the potential learning curve
- Some platforms (such as Twitter) do not have strong analytics support, making it hard to quantify the impact of social media on your marketing efforts.
Content Marketing vs. Search Engine Optimization
SEO will also be a part of your content marketing campaign, but as with Social Media they have different approaches. SEO concerns itself with making sure the content you create is easily crawled by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. As a consequence, your rankings will improve, and traffic will be driven to your site, with the traffic becoming sales if your website is optimized for conversions. While there is much overlap here as well, there are strengths and weaknesses that SEO has compared to content that are as follows:
Strengths:
- Drives traffic that is looking to buy based on keywords
- Greatly increases visibility
- Faster than content marketing, though takes time to see results still
Weaknesses:
- Does not offer direct value to user
- Only works on goods and services that users know exist
- Full-time maintenance to check backlinks and update site
Content Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing
We’ve just been focused on web marketing thus far, but for bigger brands with bigger budgets, the question becomes how content marketing compares to traditional marketing channels. Television, radio, and billboards have all been standbys for decades. So how does content marketing compare to these old classics? Here are the strengths and weaknesses of traditional marketing as it compares to content marketing:
Strengths:
- Able to reach a much wider audience
- Captive audience – if a television ad runs during a popular show it is almost certain to be seen
Weaknesses:
- Hard to measure and correlate a television campaign to results
- Expensive both for a good timeslot and to produce the commercial
Hopefully, this article has shed some light on what makes content marketing stand out compared to other forms of marketing. It is a truly unique way to get a person to buy your product, and one that is well worth the investment. Of course, it is not perfect, and any effective marketing campaign will make use of a combination of channels and tactics to get their content out there.
