‘Permission marketing’, the practice where we market to people who have given their express permission remains one of the most important marketing developments in recent years.
Popularised by marketing guru Seth Godin, permission marketing remains the opposite of traditional advertising which aims to interrupt us to get our attention such as TV and magazine adverts.
Unfortunately, for both consumers and marketers most marketing is still interruption based. So many businesses and organisations bombard us with messages, direct mail, and ads we don’t really want to see. To make matters worse, consumers have become very good at filtering out marketing spam and ignoring what isn’t relevant to them.
However, consumers and businesses still need valuable information to make sense of the world. Consumers need information to choose what products to buy and what to avoid. Businesses need to learn how to improve their products, marketing and sales in what is a fast changing and very competitive environment.
Thanks to Google and other search engines we can now access information, help and advice quickly and reliably by searching for it on the internet. Realising and meeting the demand for quality useful information and content has now become a very valued and effective tactic for the smart marketer in the digital age. Welcome to content marketing!
Content marketing is the practice of delivering quality, useful and engaging content to our customers or leads
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the practice of delivering quality, useful and engaging content to our customers or leads. It’s used to build brands, reinforce existing customer relationships and help attract new customers and clients. The content in question ranges from videos, whitepaper guides, how to guides on websites and blogs etc.
At the heart of content marketing is the idea that businesses should now share and promote information to consumers so they can position themselves as useful, interesting, informative and authoritative.
Content marketing in practice
Good content marketing begins with mapping out what your customers want. It’s here that we start to see a major departure from traditional advertising and marketing. Rather than telling consumers what we do and what we offer, we want to help consumers learn more about a particular issue or service.
So, for instance, the owner of a driving tuition service might decide that he wants to go beyond traditional advertising and help his target audience with practical information. Indeed, his target customers are young people looking for driving lessons and boy do they have a lot of questions! ‘What are the main reasons for failing a driving test’? ‘Is it true that that some test centres are easier than others?’ and of course, the favourite ‘how do I do a three point turn?’
So armed with the knowledge that he has collected over the years he makes himself useful by proving valuable content that will help them understand a bit more about the driving test. He would produce a downloadable guide on ‘top ten mistakes in the driving test and how to avoid them!’ or a video explaining how to perform some of the trickier manoeuvres.
Over time the owner can become a bit of a personality online and will gain popularity because he is actually being useful and helpful to his target customers. Of course he will also benefit from the brand exposure which will help when his target audiences decide to book their driving tuition.
Becoming a content marketing business
Making the switch from old style interruption marketing to permission based marketing that gives away valuable information isn’t easy. Not least because it means businesses need to make fundamental changes to how they interact with their consumers and a lot of large companies and public sector organisations find this a difficult prospect.
However, I really recommend that you start to look closely at content marketing and integrate it within your business. Many businesses have used it really successfully to gain and retain customers. Finally, if you want to find out more about how to embrace and ulitise content marketing, a great starting point is ‘Get Content, Get Customers’ by Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett.
