With so much to track and monitor in your business, it’s often easy to forget about the core principles that matter more than anything else. We live in a fast-paced era of constant technological change. For this reason, sometimes we miss the forest for the trees. Or we confuse the means with the end. The major principle I want to remind you of today is that “Content is king!” In other words: without great content, your marketing will surely fail. Content is the only way you can create the 3 most important things your marketing needs to succeed: Quality, Relevance, and Value.
Today, the buzz centers around “Content Marketing Strategy” as the best way to bring new customers into your business via online marketing.
Tune into Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook, The Blogosphere, Webinars, and anywhere else smart marketing people are talking, and this phrase “Content Marketing” is bandied about like “Web 2.0” was some years back. Content Marketing is an exciting development in many ways, but it’s also nothing new really. When you really think about it, Content Marketing is simply bringing us back to square one in marketing strategy — which is exactly where we should be.
For many years, web marketing shifted away from traditional “offline” marketing principles. Marketing your website was mostly about finding technical loop-holes you could exploit to get higher search engine rankings, floods of traffic, and so on. The world of “online marketing” was a separate department understood by “techies” and relegated to the basement of “real marketing strategy.”
Then, things changed.
The era of Content Marketing followed this era of technology marketing upheaval. As technology improved, Content Marketing inspired a revolution among marketers. But when you really step back and look at what’s happened, it’s simply a return to the core marketing ideas that have always worked.
Content Marketing is “SEO all grown up.” Content Marketing is blogging and social media finally behaving responsibly and maturely in a business environment.
And let’s not forget that your customer has matured as well. Customers have adapted themselves to the online marketplace, which is now nothing more than an extension of our every day lives — it’s almost strange to think of it as “online” any more at all. After all, we never really “go online” anymore do we? With mobile devices and pervasive access, we’re constantly connected in this digital era.
These changes really do prove just how much content matters regardless of what might happen with technology and marketplace changes. If there’s one principle you can count on today and tomorrow, it’s that “Content IS King!”
