Content marketing isn’t dead, it’s just no longer the cool kid on the block
Despite Isentia’s outspoken rejection of content marketing, one bad apple doesn’t ruin a whole tree, argues Mark Jones, CEO of Filtered Media.
Content marketing has lost is focus and failed to evolve. So says Hedvig Lyche, the former Isentia global strategy head and Singapore-based general manager in this Mumbrella Asia story.
What utter rubbish.
Like everyone in digital marketing, I’ve watched the fascinating King Content/Isentia saga evolve. Until now, I’ve stayed silent because there was more than enough commentary out there.
But Lyche’s comment is enough to make anyone bite. Not only is she wrong, but the opposite is true: content, and more broadly, storytelling is the most important trend in marketing today.
“We know exactly what people want to read….” ?
Lol
i really don’t know what you’re lolling about?
as professional story writers, journalists and ex-journalists have a far greater understanding of what people will read than do advertising copywriters, who are paid to extol the virtues of their paymaster’s product/service, a pursuit which on occasion may involve a veneer of storytelling
traditional advertising people are good at persuading clients that they know how people think and what they will read and respond to – whereas journos actually have to be successful at keeping eyeballs on a page in order to get paid at all
The fact that people are searching for ‘content marketing’ and ‘brand storytelling’ is the clearest indication that they don’t really know what either term means. How is ‘content marketing’ any different from digital advertorial, giving journalists an opportunity to reinvent themselves as ‘copywriters’? Direct marketing has been around a long time. Longer than the internet actually. Same s***t, different name if you ask me.
What went missing in all this is that content marketing should be a branch of marketing that merges SEO, PR and Journalistic skills into one discipline that has both the power to push sites up search rankings and/or build a community.
The mix is where the power lies as it complements the weaknesses of a few new and old marketing disciplines into something more powerful.
That’s the potential in online research heavy verticals where people buy and shop online (not too different from affiliate marketing) but it’s not how it was sold.
So it’s a bit of the same shit in a different mix, it’s just too bad it was pitched to industry like a blogging course from 2006.
Manny, lots of different pitches, or definitions, is part of the problem. Although content marketing’s heritage still lies in blogging – the radical idea that anyone can become a publisher or media company.
We take this for granted now, but it’s part of Google’s DNA, and that’s why this is bigger than “content marketing” as an isolated term. If you look at how Google treats search results, websites writing useful, relevant and user-centric content that educates people typically perform better than sites with just static content or brand-centric content.
So yes, the best approach today is to merge SEO, PR (or a brand’s point of view), with quality writing and paid amplification when it’s needed. Getting the right balance in this mix is another story.