So many new words have come into existence since I started web development back in the early 90s. From SEO, to social media, another new term is content marketing. Coming from the content management field we knew what content management was, building structures, linking strategies, taxonomies, maybe user generated content (UGC) and providing methods to manage the content provided by the community. Content management systems (CMS) came along and provided an easy and centralized way of managing all the HTML content we had.

Now enter content marketing, Wikipedia defines it as:

"Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action."

So what does all that mean? Essentially content management is the way to manage and structure content, content marketing is gauging the performance of that content. Also, we're talking marketing, so the gauging performance is one area, another is the actual marketing aspect. And what does that consist of, I call it the art of marketing without marketing (to borrow from Bruce Lee), or more like marketing without your reading perceiving it as marketing.

Say you want to drive interest to a particular product or service? You could write up a blog post, how you write that post, structure it, and distribute it to the various channels comes the marketing part. You would structure the content of the article so that it doesn't come off as a press release (one thing that really isn't going to get a read). The article would focus on real-world issues that folks are dealing with. 

Say you're releasing a new IP load balancer to provide high availability for websites, and services. The article would focus on high availability and then include references to your product. Another option would be to create a white paper, or ebook around the topic of high availability that includes relevant and quality content that someone would have to register in order to download. You now have created an email list based off of that content of people who have some interest in a enterprise web infrastructure. So now the content is marketing, but it is also measurable. Being able to measure the results of the content is that other important piece of content marketing, data drives decisions. Going one step further and have the download tied into your CRM like SalesForce, then the weight of the lead is increased automatically with the download.

Like I mentioned channel distribution is another part of the formula. With the content management system you have a valuable tool to help with distribution. My system handles distribution to RSS, so I have my podcast feed updated to iTunes, my blog, and my mobile app. On top of that I can distribute PDF downloads of content to enable print. Those are all examples of self-publishing, the other part of distribution is to third parties. My content is also distributed to sites like LinkedIn, and Social Media Today. I couldn't send press releases over to them, it has to be interesting, and relevant content that their readers will want to read. The end result of third party distribution is more traffic to my site, and building of my personal brand.

So let's go over some bullet points on content marketing:

Distribution - Not just to your own outlets, but to third parties, this include digital, and print publications. Also being able to measure the results of the different distribution channels to gauge the effectiveness of them.

Increased Traffic - With third party distribution you're hoping to increase traffic to your site. More traffic means potentially more sales. It also gets your company recognized as an expert in the field, since the content is relevant and provides insight into that topic, or industry. And hopefully you're using SEO practices, and building content on your digital outlets which in turn will generate traffic. Content is still king, and keeping it updated, and fresh will keep folks coming back to your digital channels.

Measurable Results - Like I mentioned in the previous bullet, measurable results. This could be an affiliate code that a link is clicked on, or using services like Eloqua or Marketo to handle e-mail distribution and measuring the opens, and reads. The content management system can aid here, as well as your analytics package to see the big picture, and then drive strategy based on the data.

Lead Generation - As with the white paper example, ultimately you're trying to build a list of leads for your sales team to reach out to. 

So now you know what content marketing really is, it's not about managing the content, it's about using it as a marketing tool.