I enjoy following Joe Pulizzi's blog over at Junta42. Joe's focus is content markting - how organisations can use content to engage with their users and attract new followers and fans.
The concepts are pretty straightforward, especially if you are a journalist or have worked in the publishing industry.
You provide relevant, timely content in an engaging format and you use that to start engaging with users be it through social media or other channels.
The aim is to provide useful information to users - to keep them better informed - it is not about selling to them - ads are for that.
What underpins this content is marketing automation that helps identify who the users are and what content of yours they are interested in. The content will be related to products or services you provide.
Yesterday's post by Joe focussed on why organisations would create a news service. You can see the logic - refreshed, timely and relevant content for users.(Note, the use of news in the broadest sense - interesting info that is 'news' to a user)
It is what will attract people and help bring them back time after time. And such a content service is the domain of journalists. Or rather journalists have the skills to do this kind of work as they do it day in day out.
Clearly, providing content for a company might not sit well for some journalists, but I reckon the oppportunity to bring engaging, useful content to a site that helps drive business is an exciting one.
Seems this is one area that journalists could move in to. The skills look like they would transfer easily. I also think that, as content marketing is concerned with all content output from an organisation - sales, marketing, PR - then journalists have a real opportunity to shape how content is created as a whole in order that it is as engaging and relevant as possible.
The flip side of developments in content marketing is that companies are now getting more spohisticated at generating original and useful content. This presents a challenge in the B2B space where the content has to help users do their job.
My final point, and one I am very interested in is how well publishers actually market their own content. My feeling is not particularly well, but more of that later . . .
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