In my previous post, Building the Social Media Marketing Foundation, I emphasized the importance of delivering valuable and useful content to your audience as a means of building a following and, consequently, increasing sales.
Chris Brogan, a ten-year veteran of using social media and technology to build digital relationships for businesses, drives home the same principle in his guest post today at Talent Zoo. He focuses on the five points of content marketing:
- It's brief.
- It's easy to share.
- It's about the buyer, not the product.
- It's useful.
- It isn't the sales offer. It's the lead into a marketing funnel.
Chris writes, "A how to video on hanging up a picture sponsored by Black & Decker is content marketing. A blog post about the five things we often forget when staying at a hotel sponsored by Priceline.com is content marketing." He adds, "We're talking about useful information presented in a way that makes the receiver of that information feel they've been given a value."
The point of content marketing is not, by any means, to make it a blatant sales pitch. People are far more receptive to information that is given to them free of charge, and they will be more willing to respect the sponsors/vendors creating the informational piece if it doesn't seem like a "buy our product" ploy.