Why Content Marketing Is Good—For Me and You and Everybody Else

Recently I was teasing a colleague who is making a bundle teaching a workshop on “storytelling” to a group of communication professionals, who presumably already know how to tell stories.

Jocularly, he replied that the real sharpers these days are the self-styled “social media experts.”

“Notice,” he added, “how I tiptoe around your newfound enthusiasm for ‘content marketing.’ ”

The sources of my gathering enthusiasm, I now feel compelled to explain, are two: 

First, content marketing is the smoking-hottest trend in business communication since the advent of the Internet, and only a fool would ignore it.

Put it this way. I’m the program chairman of two awards programs for communicators—the Cicero Speechwriting Awards, now in its seventh year, and the Content Marketing Awards, in its first. The Cicero Awards received 100 entries last year. The CMAs? More than 700. What in the name of Joe Pulizzi is happening here?

Something essentially good is happening, which is the second reason I’m so sanguine about content marketing—and why we should all be, as communicators, customers and citizens.

Content marketing, as it matures from best practice into standard practice, will make organizations better places to work, more responsive to do business with, and more helpful as social institutions.

Let’s take ‘em one by one.

The most immediate benefit of content marketing comes to its practitioners. Content marketing transforms communication from a defensive exercise in risk management to an aggressive attempt to express the company’s best. In this environment, every communication professional in the organization goes from cost-center to profit-center—metaphorically, from ground maintenance crew to fighter pilot, from place-kicker to quarterback, from proofreader to star columnist.

As organizations begin to value talented writers—and videographers and photographers and graphic designers—it’s obviously good for talented communicators, who benefit from more pay and more freedom to take chances to convey authentic messages via compelling storytelling to connect with real human beings.

Which, as opposed to creating stiff and sterile corporate stuff, is what communicators like to do.

And what’s good for communicators is also good for customers. Because when a company is engaged in intelligent content marketing, customers—along with everyone else in the company’s target demographic—get useful information, carefully aimed and sensitively delivered. (As opposed to the broadcast noise they got from so many companies before content marketing.)

In every industry, if a company is going to out-content market its competitors, it will be forced to get to know its customers and prospects better. Whenever companies do that, consumers win.

So communicators and consumers benefit from content marketing. Great. But society? Come on, Murray!

A content marketer I respect (and once reported to) believes that eventually content marketing would replace all media—that we’ll be getting all our news from the Wal-Mart Journal and The New York Timex.

That sounds like a dystopic vision to me, but the polite argument that he and I have had has made me see that content marketing could become something much more than the latest corporate attempt to break through their own infinite clutter. Companies can—and in a content-marketing environment, they must—earn the sustained attention, sincere respect and actual gratitude of anyone they want to reach, now or in the future.

Such an achievement doesn’t come from splashy advertising or clever social media. It requires not only communicating better than your competitor, but actually being better than your competitor. Better content marketing requires being a better employer, having a richer corporate culture, presenting a more tasteful and relevant brand, providing better service and engaging more meaningfully with all corporate constituents, right down to the local community.

Why? To bring this piece right back to the opening, because at its essence, content marketing is storytelling. And storytelling techniques be damned—if you don’t have compelling stories to tell, and lots of them, you don’t have good content marketing.

Show me great content marketing, and I’ll show you a great company.

And all of us—communicators, consumers and citizens—sure could use more of those.

As content marketers, our main duty is to the client, who hires us not to change the world but to increase sales.

But like the bricklayer who thinks of himself as a cathedral builder, content marketers should bear in mind the broader and more meaningful results of the work we do.

[Image: Official U.S. Navy Imagery]