Ditch the Term ‘Content Marketing’ … Unless You’re Talking to Marketers. Backstory I started working at Penton Media in 2000. Penton Custom Media was a small division where we worked on custom print magazines for large B2B enterprises as well as a few associations. It made massive cutbacks in spending and ALL revenue options were considered viable … even custom media. I then proceeded to talk about some of their initiatives (their custom magazine and digital articles) and how that was part of a content marketing approach, and went on to talk about what I’ve seen other companies accomplish with content marketing. All the separate disciplines that marketers were spending time on had “marketing” in the phrase – direct marketing, search marketing, email marketing, event marketing, guerilla marketing, cause marketing. That simple truth (which still exists today) changed my future, so much so that I put everything into one basket, ultimately left Penton, and started what became the Content Marketing Institute. If you are a content strategist and you can’t bring yourself to use content marketing, it’s probably fine … unless you are talking to marketers. Marketing decision-makers won’t take you seriously unless you are talking about some kind of marketing. But the term better have “marketing” in it if you are talking to marketers or you are wasting everyone’s time.
Note: This article is totally inside baseball. It will not help you at all in creating better or more customers, so if you skip it, no worries on my end.
In a long line of past articles, this one popped into my Twitter feed a few weeks back. For almost 10 years now, I’ve seen hundreds like it. But here we are, again, talking about why “content marketing” is a terrible term for the approach of creating valuable and compelling information over time to maintain or change an audience behavior.
Let’s talk about it.
Feel free to go ahead and read and/or skim the article at this time. No really, I’ll wait.
Thanks. I’m glad you made it back.
Backstory
I started working at Penton Media in 2000. At that time, Penton was the largest publicly owned B2B media company. It included hundreds of magazines, events. and web properties from manufacturing to organic foods.
I was hired in Penton’s custom media division, where I oversaw custom content projects as an account executive. Penton Custom Media was a small division where we worked on custom print magazines for large B2B enterprises as well as a few associations. As far as new business was concerned, we received leads from the advertising-sales team only when they couldn’t sell a page, booth, or banner. In other words, we got the scraps.
Everything changed after Sept. 11, 2001, when Penton went from a $30 publicly traded stock to 7 cents per share (look it up, it’s true). Amid massive debt, Penton scrounged for every dime. It made massive cutbacks in spending and ALL revenue options were considered viable … even custom media.
In 2001, there were eight people in the reporting structure between myself and the CEO. By 2002, I was reporting directly to the CEO and responsible for the custom media division (simply put, I was what they could afford at the time).
Without a sales team, it was my responsibility to go out and bring in new business. Twenty-eight years old and with barely a clue, I traveled around the country to visit chief marketing officers and vice presidents of marketing at mid-to-large B2B companies.
It was a massive failure. At the sheer mention of custom media, custom publishing, customer media, brand publishing, branded…
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