How Everyone and Their Mom is Becoming a Marketer

The title may seem vague and misleading at first, but you’ll start getting the idea after we define a few things.

Content Marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

We have talked about adding value to a website as well as making that content relevant and worthwhile for a consumer to read. And that’s where the marketing comes in. With content marketing your product is the valuable content and not necessarily the product itself. So instead of traditional – throw as much advertising junk and spam at people until 1% of them take action, content marketing says – make available worthwhile things on your website that invite users to come in. Kind of sounds a lot like Inbound Marketing, doesn’t it? That’s because in a sense it is inbound marketing. Here’s a picture to help illustrate content marketings other functions:

In this paradigm you are always using an inbound approach to consumers reaching you by providing valuable, worthwhile content aimed directly at the consumer. Intern people like the content, share it, and come back to the site more often.

That’s where your mom comes in. She is now the marketer for your product[in this case a backyard co-op guide]; you provide something worthwhile for her to read and then she shares it with all of her friends. Her friends come to your site and then your search rankings improve as well. Congratulations, your mom just completed the content marketing paradigm for you, at the cost of some time you spent drawing pictures of some chickens and providing fun, relatable content for her.

This infographic by Marketo [hint hint infographics are content marketing gold] provides some interesting data and stats about content marketing and where it’s going.