Coaching
Marketing Is Impossible - Without Great Content
By Thrity Engineer-Mbuthia
An age-old art that is intertwined with human civilization is the art of story telling . Every society has folk lore , and every culture has been passed down through the power of oral communication . Human beings are designed to talk to each other and talk about each other . Someone talks and someone else listens , but the listening part is perhaps an underestimated skill .
Visual story telling goes back to well over 20,000 years ago , where pictures etched into rocks depict life as it was then . Current scholars are able to piece the tales together and it is a powerful reminder that even then , human beings wanted to record their lives and be remembered in the future .
Fast forward to the 21st century , and not much has changed . Stories are still told , just in different ways and on different platforms . The rocks in caves have now been replaced by digital platforms . The stories are more compelling and have a wider reach . The acceptable term , at least from a marketing perspective , is content generation . But what is content marketing ?
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as a “ strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating and distributing valuable , relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience .” This in turn should result in customer action which will result in revenue generation and profitability .
There are several key words that are within this definition . The first has to do with creation of content . Most people assume content creation is just about pointing a camera and hitting record , taking some random pictures or even 2 sentences that have been generated through AI tools like ChatGPT .
Generative AI has become the rage , with marketers embracing the tools to allow for faster and more efficient content
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as a “ strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating and distributing valuable , relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience .” This in turn should result in customer action which will result in revenue generation and profitability .
generation . But as any frequent user of generative AI tools knows , the tools are not replacements for human talent . The best use of these tools is for idea generation . Ideas can feed into content creation using any preferred format . This would include email marketing , social media marketing , pay per click ads , search engine optimization and public relations content .
Once impactful content has been created , it must be distributed . Distribution is about sharing and promoting content . Distribution can occur through various social media platforms , through websites , blogs , newsletters , influencers and more .
The channels can be grouped into three . Paid media channels where one pays for content to be made available to audiences and can also be thought of as advertising , earned media which is all about likes , comments , shares and mentions where audiences interact with your content and are not paid to do so , and finally owned media which is proprietary channel that belongs to the brand eg a website or a blog . Great distribution occurs through a mix of all these .
But there is a key point to consider during content creation and distribution . The clearly defined audience . For content marketing to be effective , the target audience must be understood . In most cases , the marketer will have a clearly defined persona . A persona is a fictional representation of the target audience . The word fictional , does not mean that it is a made-up or invented composite .
The persona described is not one specific person but a customer that has all the closest characteristics of members of the
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