Managing Content Marketing: The Real-World Guide for Creating Passionate Subscribers to Your Brand

Book excerpt: Perhaps no function in the business organization has been as fundamentally revolutionized as marketing. The social and mobile Web has completely changed the speed, efficiency, and ease with which consumers can engage with each other and has had a tremendous impact on brands. This new engagement of the consumer with keen awareness of their relationships and emerging social networks now correlates to every single aspect of our business. So, yes, marketing has changed. The question is what are we going to do about it?Content and Subscription: The New Marketing OpportunityAs growth of the social and mobile Web changes the methods of communication, the old lines of hierarchical relationships between business and consumer blur substantially. As consumers publish and share their opinions (both good and bad) with increasing ease, they can become more persuasive than even the company's voice itself. Every one of these groups becomes a powerful ally or enemy depending on what we do. All of them will be constantly in flux developing levels of trust and requiring varying levels of transparency to filter content and determine buying decisions. They will expand and collapse with great velocity, and it will all happen with or without our participation.Content marketing has been around for hundreds of years. But the application of a specific strategic process around content marketing is still new. The amount of budget that is allotted for new content creation is going to become a significant part of your "new media" budget. And subject matter experts in the organization are going to have new responsibilities. It's a transformative new process and it won't happen overnight. But it can, and should, happen. Get Content Get Customers showed us the light but there's been no book to show us the way. There is an ancient Chinese proverb that says a "crisis" is simply an "opportunity riding the dangerous wind." As marketers we now have the opportunity to develop new processes with our marketing strategy, power them with content, and ultimately keep that wind at our back.Successful programs will focus on creating a thoughtful strategy and process to foster this content marketing. This book is a detailed "how-to" to build that successful content marketing process.