Death knell tolls for Content Marketing… not!
This week I received an e-mail from our CEO , Scot Combs pointing me towards an article he had seen in the Huffington Post. Yes , I know, what was he doing reading that? Note to self: obviously he has too much free time on his hands!
Seriously though, the article was interesting in many respects and was attempting to deal with an issue in the mainstream arena. The basic premise of the article was that ‘Content Marketing’ was heading for a fatal fall because eventually everybody would be doing it and therefore it would become useless.
Not so fast Mr. Critchley, ‘everybody’ does a lot of the same thing already and nothing seems to have stopped happening. While the initial argument held water for a moment , the justification of that argument seemed to deconstruct itself as it unfolded. The article was more a headline grabber than it was a fully thought out piece on the future of Content Marketing.
Below is a sample of one of my e-mails to Scot as we corresponded this week:
‘…the salient point in all this is that the ‘cream rises to the top’ always….. too much content does induce stagnation in action of the consumer because they are confused by what they don’t understand properly. Just like cable tv with 400 plus channels we seek out the quality channels and programming that reflects our ideas and aspirations….we don’t even pay attention to the stuff we don’t want…there’s the rub….if something grows to be good but was crap at the start we will miss it but so will the providers.
The key is to grow the conversation together and never produce stuff that you are not quite confident will sit well with the audience. If this argument really holds water then we must account for the rise in book sales , for example, the constant production of novels and reference books goes on unabated in similar conditions to the ones being forecast in this article…… bottom line is that if you like something or someone your tolerance for it it unyielding….. marriage, hobbies, jobs, etc are things many of us maintain through thick and thin regardless of the trending fashions.
Saying there is too much content on the horizon which will undo the benefit of having it is like saying there is too much oxygen in the air….we all have a limit to the volumes of anything we can handle…..if there is increasing content out there it will not alter the amount I consume significantly even if it alters the sources I use.’
Merely adopting a content marketing focused approach does not mean success any more than relying on SEO does. What counts is the quality of content, always has and always will. A very important point in all this is that good content marketing is not ‘done’ to the consumer but developed in partnership with the consumer. Mr. Critchley would be correct in his assumption if the surge in content marketing was just aimed at consumers rather than for consumers. If the former applies rather than the latter we have advertising and that is not content marketing by any stretch of the imagination.
Here is the article , is he correct ?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/spencer-critchley/conten
This quick video sums up what is going on….
Don’t forget to check out Scot’s Vidiotheque next week where he also talks about this article from his perspective.
see you on the long and winding road……… Patrick