I had the pleasure of guest blogging at the King Fish Media ThinkTank blog the other day. You can check out the complete post here.
This was written after I had a brief conversation with a marketer that was taking the angle of content marketing being nice “fluff” to give your clients, but not necessary to the overall marketing strategy for most companies. Of course, I (as nice as I could) disagreed with the gentleman and cited a number of reasons why he was completely off his rocker.
The web has turned most business models completely upside down, and created huge opportunities for others to launch businesses from nothing at all. The delivery of consistent and valuable content may be the most important indicator of financial success for future businesses.
If I’m launching a business today, or looking into the overall vision of the company, I’m looking at these three aspects of the business.
- Customer Service Excellence
- Valuable, Relevant Content Strategy
- Helpful/Innovative Product Product
Note that I put the product itself as #3 on the list. Products can be duplicated in almost every industry today, especially with the rise of cheaper labor overseas. What separates one business from another is #1 and #2, which involves honest, transparent and consistent communication with customers and prospects. Cool products come and go – a relevant and consistent message is timeless. IMPORTANT NOTE: new products launch all the time and can become successful very fast just by the nature of the product. We’ve seen this happen with many web-based applications. But without a consistent content marketing strategy, competition can come in and duplicate the product quickly if the company has not clearly differentiated itself through their communications.
Medium-sized and Larger organizations with better-known brands should begin positioning their content as a product in their company (mostly so organizational management starts to take the concept seriously). This means creating R&D budgets, long-term content strategies, ongoing measurements against the content, and content growth strategies.
By doing this, an organization will make the investment necessary to truly differentiate themselves from the competition, and fend off any new competitors who simply try to copy their base products.
RSS Feed – Subscribe to the Junta42 Blog – Junta42 – Junta42 Match
