What Is Content Marketing, Really?

When you think about marketing, what do you picture? Flyers? Coupons? Billboards? Banner ads? Or do you picture a white paper, a blog post, or an infographic? If you picture the latter, then it's safe to say you are part of the content marketing revolution. Consumer expectations are changing and so are the tactics companies are using to reach them. Today's customers are looking for more than a few dollars off, and today's marketers are giving consumers the information and value they need through content marketing.

Study after study confirms what most of us already know: People respond to content, not advertising. According to "Consumers' Attitudes Toward Custom Content," 70 percent of people surveyed say they "prefer to learn about a company through a collection of articles rather than in an ad." Marketers have heard that message loud and clear, embracing the idea of content marketing wholeheartedly. The interest in content marketing has only grown since that study came out, as audiences have become even more discerning about the content they consume.

However, if you believe the numbers (and I am about to share a lot of numbers with you), you probably don't need convincing that content marketing is a must-have tool in your bag of marketing tricks. Google searches for the term "content marketing" have grown 400 percent since 2011. Back in 2014, the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs found that 93 percent of marketers said they were using content marketing. That number is so high it's almost shocking. In 2015, they tweaked the definition of content marketing and got slightly different results, with 86 percent of respondents saying their organizations use content marketing. In 2016 that number jumped a bit to 88 percent. It's clear that the siren song of content marketing is strong, and if you aren't careful about your approach, you might just crash on the rocks.

At first glance, content marketing seems simple — almost a dream come true. Instead of buying expensive billboards or television ads to raise brand awareness, all you have to do is create some great content, post it on your blog, promote it through your social channels, and voila! Right?

Wrong.

While traditional marketers and brands may be eager to cash in on the content marketing craze, I have a word of warning for them: Content marketing isn't as easy as it seems. According to CMI's B2C Content Marketing 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends — North America, 76 percent of Business to Consumer (B2C) marketers are using content marketing but only 28 percent consider themselves effective at it (with just 10 percent describing themselves as very effective). That hasn't slowed down the content machine, though. The amount of content companies continue to create has grown consistently — even though only 43 percent understand what "content marketing success" looks like. Here's the takeaway: The buzz is massive, but many still struggle to define content marketing, let alone implement it successfully.

Social Media Today's "13 Ways Content Marketers Miss the Mark" found that the three biggest complaints expressed by B2B audiences are too many barriers to downloading materials, self-promotional content, and (perhaps the worst offense of all) content that lacks substance. While it is tempting to dismiss the marketers creating this content as a clueless minority, it's clear that a hefty majority of marketers and brands are still struggling to fine-tune their content marketing and make it a useful part of their overall strategy. Forrester's "Compare Your B2B Content Marketing Maturity" found that "51 percent of B2B marketing leaders rate their content marketing practices as very mature, an overwhelming 85 percent fail to connect content activity to business value — and, as a result, fail to retain customers or win their long-term loyalty." These results are unacceptable — especially for a channel that is so important to so many companies — but they are also predictable, considering that so many practitioners still don't grasp the real meaning of content marketing.

Defining Content Marketing

So let's start at the beginning by simply defining what content marketing is. If you ask 100 different people, you're likely to get 100 different answers. The confusion stems in part from the stealthy nature of content marketing, which aims to go (almost) unnoticed as marketing while simultaneously providing valuable content to customers that ultimately raises the brand's profile and results in sales.

Unlike so many other things in life, you may not know content marketing when you see it. In fact, if the content creators are doing their jobs right, you often won't notice you're being marketed to until it's too late, and you're already poking around the brand's site — or are even in a store — to purchase the product the marketers were hoping you would buy all along. To complicate matters further, content marketing often doesn't even reveal what it's selling. Take, for instance, Chipotle's Farmed and Dangerous (see Figure 1.1), a show the burrito-slinging chain created for Hulu.

Antony Young described the show on Adage.com: "Farmed and Dangerous takes branded content to another level by not including any branding at all in the show. Social Media Week organizers dubbed it Unbranded Entertainment. Chipotle and other advertisers placed commercials in the show, but by not including branding in the show itself, the restaurant has taken a risk that few marketers would entertain."

Instead of pushing burritos, Farmed and Dangerous used comedy to reach the masses with a message from Chipotle — though viewers may have been blissfully unaware where the content was coming from. Famous for its efforts to source ingredients sustainably, Chipotle created a show about the dangers of industrial agriculture, not about its own food.

This wasn't the first time Chipotle tackled this topic in its marketing. Many may remember its "Back to the Start Commercial" that featured Willie Nelson singing Coldplay's "The Scientist" while adorable animated farmers realized the error of their industrialized ways. If you didn't watch carefully, you may have missed the Chipotle tag at the end.

Not all content marketing will be devoid of any branding. In fact, if your goal is to drive actual sales and not just general "brand lift," then you will almost certainly have to include some brand information, but it's important to keep one...