Content Marketing: Is It Something Or Is It Nothing?

Content Marketing: Is It Something Or Is It Nothing?

Author: Matthew Grant / Source: Business 2 Community A couple weeks ago, I came across this post and it really stuck in my craw. The auth

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A couple weeks ago, I came across this post and it really stuck in my craw.

The author, Samuel Scott, states his opinion right in the title, “Apples are not oranges – and ‘content marketing’ means nothing.”

Now, to be fair, even though I have had a “Director of Content Strategy” title for many years and have essentially made my living since 2009 doing things related to “content marketing,” I am actually sympathetic to his main point: The hype has been outrageous ever since content marketing became a thing and the word “content” is so generic that it can mean anything.

Case in point: I was part of a team that offered online courses and we had hired someone to put together a course on “content strategy.” I was imagining something that would focus on audience research, definition of content topics, approaches to content creation, planning for content distribution, and so on.

When the consultant submitted her course outline, it was clear that what she meant by content was anything written that would be part of an application interface.

In the same vein, the CEO of the company I was working for at the time essentially thought of web copy as “content.”

The word “content” is not very useful. But can the same be said about the phrase “content marketing”?

Does confusion about something mean it doesn’t exist?

In a nutshell, Scott believes that content marketing is simply marketing promotion or marketing communications or even direct response advertising. Here’s how he frames the issue:

The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) defines “content marketing” in this way:

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

But is that something truly separate and distinctive? Let’s go back to one of the basic elements of marketing theory. Here’s the definition of “marketing communications” (from my old textbook ‘Principles of Marketing‘ by Philip T. Kotler and Gary Armstrong):

“A company’s total promotion mix – also called its marketing communications mix –consists of the specific blend of advertising, public relations, personal selling, sales promotion, and direct-marketing tools that the company uses to persuasively communicate customer value and build customer relationships.”

In the end, both “marketing communications” and “content marketing” are merely the creation and transmission of marketing collateral over channels to an audience. “Marketing communications” came before the “content marketing,” so by definition the latter is merely a buzzword for the former.

Scott uses a kind of rhetorical sleight-of-hand to dismiss content marketing outright in this passage, specifically in the last paragraph when the reduces “content” to “marketing collateral,” a term that does not appear in the cited CMI definition.

Furthermore, even though he cites Kotler, he ignores the fact that in the latter’s definition of the marketing communications mix there is not a single reference to the type of content that the CMI definition is referring to.

What is content marketing content?

When I try to…

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