As the Internet era dawned and flourished, online marketing become the new frontier for brands and marketers. Of all the online or internet marketing techniques out there, content marketing is the one that generates the most buzz and often times produces great results for companies that are able to use content marketing smartly. Although the term content marketing may have gained prominence as companies adopted online marketing, it has been around for centuries.
Content marketing is not just the creation and distribution of content online. Any form of content distribution comes under the umbrella of content marketing, and companies have been unwittingly practising content marketing for decades, even before the practise had a name.
History of content marketing
Some experts say that content marketing started with the caveman as we have been able to find the first forms of custom publishing in the form of cave paintings dating back to 4200 B.C. However, most agree that John Deere was the pioneering company in content marketing. It launched its first customer magazine known as “The Furrow” in 1895 and it is still running. This magazine is considered to be a shining example of content marketing because instead of just offering advertisements and promotions to customers, it offered valuable content that customers could benefit from.
Another early example of content marketing is the 400-page long guide offered by Michelin Tires for its customers. This guide offered tips on automobile care, travel tips and other vehicle related information and was distributed for free by the company. The guide became so successful that soon the company was able to sell the guides for a profit. Jell-O is another brand that was able to use innovative content marketing early on to not only increase profits but to also make the brand a household name.
When the company was founded, no one knew what Jell-O was and no one ate the product. The brand launched its own cookbook with recipes involving Jell-O. This book showed customers how they could use Jell-O in daily cooking and cook up fabulous desserts with very little time and effort using Jell-O. Other major companies like P&G, Microsoft, Nike, etc. have practised content marketing over the years, way before the Internet was born.
More recently, Red Bull is the brand that everyone refers to when talking about exceptional content marketing. The brand sells only the Red Bull energy drink, but has been able to make itself synonymous with a high-adventure, high-adrenaline lifestyle. Their website and magazine called “Red Bulletin” publishes some of the best images, videos and textual content related to adventure sports. Their content marketing division produces unique content of such high quality that it has been compared to some major publishing and media brands. More importantly, with their content, the brand has been able to attract their target audience and turn them into fans.
Content marketing is now practised by many companies and more stick to distributing their content online as it keeps publishing costs to a minimum. Coca Cola, American Express, Google, etc. are some of the major companies using content marketing. Many smaller businesses rely almost solely on online content marketing to market the brand and its products and they have been able to achieve immense success.
What content marketing should be?
Experts have been able to identify many distinct examples of content marketing even before the advent of the internet, because the brands were able to teach customer and offer content that they found useful with their marketing campaigns. The objective wasn’t to advertise or promote the brand, but to help customers solve their problems. Content marketing is subtle promotion of the brand where customers are not thrust with blatant advertising and promotional materials but are in fact guided and helped by the brand.
The goals of content marketing and public relations has always been to attract new customers, to improve relationships with existing customers, promote the product by describing and demonstrating its benefits and using storytelling and user-generated content to keep customers interested. Of course the immediate goal of content marketing is to enable the brand to appear at the top of search results of major search engines.
With content marketing brands can get interested customers and leads to come to them and such interested people have more intentions of engaging further with the brand and to buy products and services. PR is about making news and getting in the face of the customers. Content marketing is more about finding what kind of content people want and are searching for and then delivering such content via the right content distribution channels. This is why social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn play such an important part in content marketing.