Original post has been published by Pam Didner. Pam is a Global Content Marketing Strategist and Author and this is her blog.
Content marketing is using content as a way to communicate the benefits of your products and services.
Although my teenage sons thought it was pretty cool that I published a book, Global Content Marketing, they only vaguely know that it’s a marketing book. They didn’t bother to find out until recently what it is really about when one of them finally asked me: “What exactly is [global] content marketing, mom?”
Rather than giving them a formal definition, I asked him what he usually does when he is interested in purchasing a product or a service. He told me that he would search the name of the products, research on the Internet, read product reviews and talk to his friends. I told him the information comes up when he does his research is called content. “In the web industry, anything that conveys meaningful information to humans is called content.” (Erin Kissane). It’s as simple as that!
Content marketing is using content as a way to communicate the benefits of your products and services. Hopefully, you do a great job of explaining it (and its benefits) and your customers are willing to give your product a try. I suggested two sources for him to check out content marketing definitions if he is interested:
- Six Useful Content Marketing Definitions by Joe Pulizzi
- Content Marketing Definitions: 21 Experts Weigh In by Heidi Cohen
Amanda Maksymiw’s “content marketing” definition resonates with me:
“The process of developing and sharing relevant, valuable, and engaging content to target audience with the goal of acquiring new customers or increasing business from existing customers.”
To make it simple, I built the definition of “Global Content Marketing” upon Maksymiw’s:
“The process of developing and sharing relevant, valuable and engaging content to target audience [across countries] with the goal of acquiring new customers or increasing business from existing customers [globally].”
So, there it is. My son nodded:
“Create useful information to help your customers make decisions.”
He pretty much sums it up. Of course, what information to create? Where to syndicate your information? How to measure it? The devil is in the details.
As a 17-year-old boy, my son has no interest in pursuing the topic further! However, if you are a marketer who is interested in understanding the process of global content marketing, check out this one-pager or book review on Amazon.