Name: Epic Content Marketing
Rating: 4.2 (110 reviews)
Author: Joe Pulizzi

What’s in it for me? Learn how to attract customers through creating content to improve their lives.

Among his recent predictions, trend curator Rohit Bhargava described what he called the “Reluctant Marketer.” Bhargava believes that soon, marketing as we know it today – yelling louder than your competitors about how good your product is – will be a thing of the past.

Thoughtful marketing that offers advice and value will instead take the place of generic advertising noise; messages that focus on the needs of the consumer, not the virtues of the product, will be the norm.

The future of marketing will be content marketing, and the future of business will belong to those companies that can master their message and tell a compelling story to an audience they know well.

These blinks will give you a leg up on the competition and help you craft your own successful content marketing strategy from the ground up.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

why a good story is more powerful than a great product;
how the most effective marketing ideas are cheap, too; and
how sharing others’ content will help you sell your services better.

Content marketing helps you grab customers’ attention by giving them the information they crave.

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.

First, be content aware. Then, establish your expertise. Finally, inspire others with your story.

Before you dive headlong into content marketing, it’s important to think about what exactly your company wants to achieve with it.

There are three distinct levels to content marketing, and each produces a different result. Let’s examine the three levels: being content aware, being a thought leader and storytelling.

Use sharing strategies and SEO to promote your content far and wide.

So you’ve outlined your strategy and you’ve assembled a content team. What’s next? Now, you need to figure out how to promote your content.

Social media is key, but which services should you use? Do you want to use Facebook, to reach as many people as possible? Doing so would mean you’d face more competition.

Key ideas in Epic Content Marketing

What is Epic Content Marketing about?

Epic Content Marketing (2014) offers you a step-by-step guide to mastering one of today’s most innovative approaches to product marketing. Knowing your audience and assembling a top-notch content team are just some of the key elements to achieving a successful content marketing strategy and getting ahead in a highly competitive market.