A new technique in 'content marketing' hits mainstream.
Content marketing is so hot right now I’m surprised it hasn’t spontaneously combusted.
The idea of content marketing is not particularly unique: rather than overtly sell your products, teach the customer about stuff, and hopefully your products will sell themselves.
Or as defined by the Content Marketing Institute:
The idea of content marketing is to attract and retain customers by creating and curating relevant and valuable content
I’ve never quite understood about how this is really different to modern marketing, but that’s another blog post.
A popular technique, also based in clickbait (also another blog post) is to talk about what you can learn about something through relating it to a totally irrelevant (but preferably in the news recently) person/event/thing.
Here’s a great example:
Now let’s break down the content from this. Thanks to the wise lessons of The Boss, content marketers can now know to:
- Use / tell stories, because people like them.
- Display passion
- Produce valuable content [perhaps a slightly ironic recommendation]
- Focus on long-term wins
- Be creative
- Focus on the audience
Now I don’t know about you, but that pretty much reads like ‘how to do marketing good’, or marketing 101, put in a more grammatically correct fashion. Why it has to be re-written and re-packaged (probably 10-15 times over the course of a blog-year) I am highly uncertain. I’m all for reminders and prompts to go back to the core concepts of things, but do we really need the shaky link?
Regardless of the tenuous links to Springsteen (Omg? He doesn’t do the same thing every concert? Scandalous), I would like to leave with this one piece of key advice.
Produce content people want to read, not just content ‘because content [marketing]’.