Content Marketing

Posted on April 14, 2009 | Permalink

By Lane Casteix

Advertising is being reinvented before our eyes. The legacy system, interruption marketing, is losing relevance and effectiveness.

Interruption marketing works on the premise that publishers attract an audience with engaging news stories or entertainment and then interrupts the delivery with advertising messages. We have lived with this model for as long as publishing and advertising have been around.

The times are changing. While interruption marketing may not disappear, it is losing ground rapidly and becoming less relevant and less effective. For example, newspaper circulations are down and many large papers are on the verge of collapse because of the loss of revenue from advertisers abandoning the system.

What is taking ever larger bites out of interruption marketing is new media and the concept of content marketing that delivers commercial messages in the form of engaging news, information, and entertainment. The content is the ad!

Content marketing manifests itself as custom magazines, email newsletters, blogs, forums, and even things like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter posts. The idea is to produce content that is of value to those who are your customers or potentially your customers. Give them information they both need and want and do it in a form that is not only informative but even entertaining. Make their need to know as easy for them as possible and most importantly, interact with them on a personal level. Listen to what they have to say, both good and bad and respond to their concerns.

This may require the services of an agency that does this sort of marketing or the addition of dedicated personnel inside your organization who have the responsibility to handle this, and it can be a full time position.

The options for content marketing programs are many and varied. You can simply present a company presence as a designated spokesperson who monitors conversations about your products and responds when appropriate. Or it can become a complex campaign, where a company or product personality (fictional) represents the product online and creates an online following on sites like Twitter and Facebook, responds to consumers directly in discussion forums, and even publishes their own blog about the product.

This is the time to get really creative. There are lots of new promotional ideas out there. Call us if you want to talk about it.