F#ck Content Marketing summary

How often do you log in to your Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram account with the intent of just killing a quick five minutes, only to look up from your device to discover a half-hour has gone missing?

Well, this happens to a lot of users of social media, because these products are expertly designed to keep you engaged.

Here’s a famous joke among content marketers. Question: Where’s the best place to hide? Answer: The second page of a Google search result. But seriously, folks, no one wants to be low in Google rankings, since those doing the searching rarely look beyond the first page of results.

Like any other service, when people look for online content, they want a smooth and easy experience.

Imagine you’re terribly thirsty and your favorite cold beverage is waiting for you. The twist is that you can drink your favorite beverage either in a dank, smelly basement or on a sunny, quiet beach in the Caribbean. Not a difficult choice, is it?

Well, this is essentially the same decision content marketers need to keep in mind when considering content experience, which refers to the kind of environment in which customers will experience content.

Do you have more content than you know what to do with? It might sound like a rare problem, but according to content marketer Robert Rose, the average business only publishes about a fifth of all the content it creates. That’s pretty wasteful, don’t you think?

The key to making sure your content gets put to maximum use is to centralize and organize it all in one place. There are so many free publishing platforms these days that it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks, so it’s smart to create a database in which to index your content.

Remember the video rental chain Blockbuster? Those big blue stores were everywhere in the 1990s. But once Netflix showed up on the scene, Blockbuster soon went bankrupt.

One of the reasons for Netflix’s success was that it was so much better at organizing its content in a way that was easy and intuitive for the customer to browse through.

Once you’ve created engaging content, and you’ve organized it so that it’s easy to navigate, the job of effective content marketing then turns to the problem of how to get it noticed. How are your target customers going to know that there’s this bountiful bonanza of content just waiting to impress them?  

This is where content distribution comes into play.