Is content marketing growing up?

One of the biggest challenges we content marketers face today is ourselves.

Sure, it can be tempting to try to keep up with the latest marketing success story — the Oreo dunk in the dark, the Arby’s hat at the Grammy’s. And real-time affirmations from social media can make it easy to confuse attention with success.

But, if you study them, most truly successful content marketing examples focus on a very small group of targeted prospects, rather than trying to hit a home run with millions of people (even though the latter may be the result).

One of my favorite examples, from Jay Baer’s book, Youtility, is Taxi Mike’s Dining Guide, the humble, printed flyer created by a taxi driver who lives in a ski resort town in the Canadian Rockies.

As the story goes, Taxi Mike would routinely get questions from his riders about where to go and what to do in the small town of Banff, Alberta. But nothing existed that he could use to answer these frequent questions.

If nothing exists, an opportunity does

Realizing the need, Taxi Mike created a simple brochure that identified the best places for certain types of food and drink in Banff. He handed it out to people in his cab and gave it to local restaurants and bars. It wasn’t designed to ‘go viral’ or help people across the globe, just those who asked him for help.

As you know by now, Taxi Mike’s Dining Guide caught on…but why? Who do you think the grateful patrons who relied on his guide would call for a taxi at the end of the night?

Exactly.

A model for how to create great content

Did Taxi Mike create a series of high-production Vine videos? Did his guide spend weeks in design? Was it printed on 100-pound coated pearl white metallic card stock? Of course not.

And that’s exactly why it worked.

A big part of its success was in its authenticity. People could tell this was something created locally and that’s why they trusted it. Of course, that doesn’t mean everything should be humble. Or even printed.

But it does mean content marketers need to be aware of what their target persona are looking for. In this case, it was useful information — but it was also authenticity. In others, it will almost certainly be something else.

The point is to find out what your audience is looking for so you can give it to them as you’re helping them. Did Taxi Mike know all of this? Probably not, but who cares! His guide is a great inspiration for content marketers.

With everyone focusing on creating content today, we not only need to help people with our content, we need to do it in a way that builds trust. 

I, for one, think content marketing is up to the challenge.

Image courtesy of taximike.com

Did advertising create Content Marketing (and, perhaps more importantly, should horses wear hats)?

Back in colonial America, business owners had to rely on advertising (mail-order catalogs and newspaper ads, mainly) to pitch their products and services. But, as department store owner John Wannamaker is often credited with saying, no one knew for sure what was working:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”

Promotional products became the solution

Searching for a way to measure effectiveness, companies started creating promotional items they could offer as an incentive to measure response. And, as you can imagine, some of these early giveaways were pretty bad.

While the traditional promotional product standbys like rulers and hand-held paper fans with printed messages were great (and are still popular today), some companies thought that hats for horses were a good idea.

Yes, hats for horses.

Okay, let’s place the blame where it really belongs

It’s more likely that printers of the day, who created the fledgling promotional products business to utilize their presses when they weren’t printing newspapers, came up with some of the more questionable ideas. It all started innocently enough with burlap book bags for students. That escalated to bags for marbles, card cases, calendars and the aforementioned horse hats.

Taking an idea and making it bigger (and better)

While horses everywhere shuddered, some innovative companies took the idea of creating something to measure response and elevated it — creating things that actually did more. Heard of John Deere’s Furrow magazine? Or the Michelin Guide? Or Jell-O recipe books? These companies went beyond horse hats (the 1880s version of click bait) and decided to create something that was actually useful.

So did advertising create Content Marketing? Maybe. But, now that technology has enabled Content Marketing to come into its own, the time is right to look for the next challenge.

What’s next for Content Marketing?

If we, as content marketers, think of ourselves as similar to those first companies that made a conscious choice to elevate promotional products to a more ‘useful’ status — shouldn't that cause us to think more broadly about the content we're creating today? (That's rhetorical...yes, it should).

The next time you have the opportunity to create content, think of those trailblazers who chose to elevate their content (even though they didn't call it that). Don't settle for something your audience will merely click on or subscribe to -- help them solve a problem.

In other words, create great content. People will thank you with their business.

Photo credit: roundstable.com

Picking on the words: native

Those of you in the content marketing space probably know where this is headed, but I want to challenge the way we use the word native more broadly than just in terms like native advertising.

So what is native, really?

Dictionaries say it’s a term that refers to a local inhabitant; something or someone that’s innate, not acquired. Based on that definition, very little about what we use the word for today fits at all.

Native software, for example, refers to programs that are created for or supported by a specific operating system (not typically those that were there to begin with). That’s a miss.

Native Americans refers to the people Europeans encountered when they discovered the so-called ‘new world’ they named America. How can you be native to a ‘new’ place that someone else has given a new name? They were certainly native, but I doubt they would consider themselves Americans. Miss.

And, finally, native advertising refers to messages created by a publisher to essentially deceive its audience by camouflaging a story from a brand to look as if it’s part of the publication.

Oops.

As expected, while there are some pretty big offenders in the use of the word, native advertising clearly wins.

Perhaps that’s what we should expect when combining a publishing industry desperate for some way — any way —to survive in the digital world they didn’t adapt to quickly enough with brands that are equally desperate for some way to stand out.

Expected? Perhaps. Does that make it okay? Absolutely not.

Tricking people who are not just your customers but also your greatest assets is more than offensive, it’s downright stupid. In fact, I’m not sure who’s more to blame here…the publishers who haven’t adapted and feel forced to take this path or die; or the brands who are clearly leveraging a short term gain in spite of those who would be their customers. Maybe both?

The bottom line is that native advertising is neither native nor advertising. And hiding behind a term that is deliberately nebulous to extract a short-term gain is cowardly and both the publishers and the brands that are participating should be called out for doing so.

But we probably won’t need to worry about that.

Today’s consumers are empowered, connected and smart. In the long run, they will understand (and remember) which publishers and brands are taking advantage of them currently through native advertising.

So what can these publishers and brands do? Not much.

Smart consumers know they are in charge and the publishers and brands attempting to fool them today through native advertising probably won’t be around too much longer to worry about it.

Photo courtesy of stockimages via freedigitalphotos.net