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