Epic Content Marketing summary

Marketing is everywhere. You are, on average, bombarded by some 5,000 marketing messages every single day!

As a consumer, there are few moments of the day when you’re not being asked to consider a product or service. As a business, on the other hand, you’ve got to fight through this persistent noise to get your message heard.

To make sense of the chaos, you need to realize the fundamental mistake of traditional advertising. Your customers don’t care about your products or your services. Customers care about themselves.

If all you do is list your product’s great features, your message will fall on deaf ears. But what if you instead helped your customers to understand how those features could change their lives?

This is content marketing – a new marketing approach that gives you the power to truly grab your customers’ attention.

Agricultural specialist Deere & Company is already incorporating content marketing into its overall strategy. The company’s publication “The Furrow” is no mere sales catalog but a magazine that informs farmers about the latest agricultural technology and how to successfully use it. By providing trustworthy advice, Deere also increases demand for its own products.

Content marketing can also benefit companies through strategies that can increase consumer trust for a far lower cost than traditional marketing.

Venture capital firm OpenView in 2009 launched a blog to share the company’s insights about topics of interest to entrepreneurs, such as marketing and finance. Within three years, as many as 18,000 subscribers signed up.

Yet if OpenView had decided instead to attract clients through more traditional methods, such as billboard or television ads, the company’s marketing costs would have been far higher. In contrast, operating a blog was very inexpensive.

And as OpenView expanded its collection of informational posts, podcasts and videos, it became a trusted resource for exactly the kind of entrepreneurs the company wanted to attract.