Notes On Good to Great Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi

I thought Content Marketing is a new terminology and marketing strategy. I found out listening on Joe Pulizzi’s seminar that content marketing is already old. A classic example of this was the farming magazine, “The Furrow” originally from 1931 which is still one of the most popular circulated magazine today.

The idea of content marketing on the perspective of business owners is that business start acting more like a media company and a publisher that market its services and products; creating their own media and own content on a consistent basis to attract and retain customers and aim to result to change or retain some sort of behavior on these customers.

What is the difference between Marketers and Publishers? The main difference is how money comes in…. 99% of most business models from publishers come from sponsorship and paid advertisements. On the other hand, marketers are concerned on how to maintain and drive sales.

A joint research conducted in 2013 by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs of 2000 respondents from North America showed the following findings:

  1. 91% uses Content Marketing
  2. an average of 33% of Marketing budget is used for Content Marketing;
  3. companies use an average of 12 content marketing tactics (Social media, blogs, eNewsletters, whitepapers, videos among others)
  4. 54% increase their content marketing budget

However, the most most thrilling fact based on the research, is that, only 36% of these respondents believe their content marketing is effective. According to Joe, the problem is in the huge education gap in how to tell a good story and how to use available publishing tools.

The biggest content marketing challenge business owners face are producing enough content and producing the kind of content that engages customers. Joe calls it, The Problem of What.

Joe suggests business owners to list their strategy and ask themselves, why are they creating content at all? What kind of content are they creating to meet their goal? The secret sauce answers how the needs of the business meet the customer needs. Joe calls it, the business “Content Marketing Mission”.

Today, customers don’t care about products, the services, they all care about themselves. So how do businesses get their attention? → Businesses must provide information that are really helpful to them and solve their pain points.

Here are the strategies a business can consider in content marketing:

#1. Niche, no sales content platform — the strategy being used by Procter and Gamble by having different marketing channel for different buyers. Having a blog to cater to specific audience. Examples are homemadesimple.com; Beinggirl.com

#2. Story Explosion — the strategy used by Kelly Services. This strategy deals with identifying pain points (Story) and creating the contents for each topic using different channels (Pinterest infographics, slideshare ebooks, among others).

#3.The Chief Storyteller — the strategy of filling up roles of a content marketing team — the chief content officer, managing editor, content producer, content creator and chief listening officer.

#4. Leveraging Employees in Content Creation — employees share their expertise and contents. May employ and editor to collect information in all possible form (email, in a format, among others).

#5. Building Content Expertise through Community — the strategy used by Joe Pulizzi himself building his Content Marketing Institute. He focused on a niche and give away useful information and spread it around the community. Contents are contributed by other people. Partner with as many people as possible.



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