Well of course you’ve heard it all before .. ‘Content is King’
…and we’re all starting to get that by now me thinketh? i.e. ‘businesses are what they share’.
Clearly, if a business has no content - with what can the reader engage? To what can they respond or react?
Content IS Social Media?
Everyone talks about businesses using Social Media to achieve their goals… lead generation, thought leadership, sales, better reach, engagement, brand development, reputation management. I could go on with such a list but I think you get the gist. So, what do people really mean when they talk about using Social to achieve thier aims?
Well, quite simply, once they’ve ascertained the right platform on which their target market is likely to be hanging out..Twitter, or Facebook or Linkedin or Google+ for example, then the platforms themselves are merely vehicles! They can do nothing for a business if that business isn’t feeding the platform.
Content Marketing must be the King’s men and King’s horses?
An increasingly accepted definition for content marketing is:
“the marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action“.
I’ve developed a little tag for Content Marketing. I call content marketing ‘all the kings men and all the kin’s horses’ now I know they couldn’t put Humpty together again but, if you have the men and horses in action, they’ll be able to save you before you ‘fall off the fence’!
So, content marketing is the entourage enabling Content (aka the King) to reign supreme. To keep his subjects (i.e. our target audiences) happy and engaged!
It’s reason-detre, is to entice and keep customers by consistently creating germane and valuable content with the purpose of altering or positively influencing consumer behaviour. It’s ongoing process that is best integrated into the overall marketing strategy.
So, the purpose of this blog was to clarify what content marketing is all about and to stress it’s importance. What do you think about the whole king; kings men and horses thing? Make sense? We’d love to hear your views and experiences of the role content plays (or doesn’t) for your business?
You might be interested to know that co-author Michelle Carvill, of the new book The Business of Being Social is running a full day training course this month on Content Marketing here at Business Training Made Simple.
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This post was brought to you by Elizabeth Floyd – Head of Business Training Made Simple
Business Training Made Simple part of the Made Simple Group is a London based training company delivering Certificated and CPD approved training across two streams: 1. Social Media training and its key platforms, 2.Search Engine Marketing training .
We run public courses in London and tailored in-house training UK/Europe-wide.
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Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn provide an opportunity for you to connect with an audience. This audience is not the same for each site. Your Twitter followers are not necessarily your Facebook fans and your LinkedIn followers may not follow you on Twitter. Each site attracts different users. 
