Content Marketing for CEOs: Three Questions to Answer

What does that mean — content marketing?

Simply put, content marketing means that instead of buying attention through advertising (i.e. “Hey, look at me!”), you invest in helpful and interesting information that brings attention to your organization. It means thinking like a publisher.
Yes, publishing.

Although still a relatively new term, content marketing has stormed onto the scene as something that all businesses need to take seriously.

The first recognized usage of content marketing was by John Deere. In the late 1800s, farmers needed vast amounts of information in order to best leverage newer technology to grow crops. Rather than leave this to traditional magazines or newspapers to handle, John Deere stepped up and created the magazine The Furrow, a collection of articles on farming best practices.  The Furrow positioned John Deere as the trusted expert in farming, and farmers began to rely on John Deere’s publishing…and at the same time purchased John Deere’s equipment. Over 100 years later, The Furrow is still an essential tool for farmers (and John Deere).

Fast forward to today with the rise of social media, mobile devices and connectivity, and 88% of businesses use some form of content marketing:

• 79% create original content for social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook
• 61% send out regular informational newsletters
• 51% blog
• 41% create videos

Looks like a lot of publishing, doesn’t it?

And this is just the start. Customers and prospects continue to get inundated with thousands of marketing messages every day, but how do you cut through that clutter as a business to attract and retain customers?

What the CEO needs to do

Whether or not you are aware of it as content marketing in your organization, you are doing it. So before going any further, there are a few questions CEOs need to answer when it comes to content marketing:

1.    What’s the story? In other words, what is the story that’s being driven into your employees that is building your company culture?  Is it compelling enough to make people — both employees and prospects — want to sit up and listen?  If yes, then how you are telling that story throughout the organization and in ways customers and prospects can find it?

2.     Is it about you or your customers? Most companies like to talk about themselves in their marketing – in brochures, in social media, etc.  Lots of feature/benefit stuff.  That’s all fine, but are you focusing on the pain points of your customers with your content marketing?  Are you solving the problems that keep them up at night as part of your story?

If you are going to consistently communicate with your customers, it can’t always be about your products — it has to be focused on solving their problems.  What would you talk about if you were the leading trade magazine?  That’s the kind of information your customers need to hear from you.

3.    Who is in charge? Ultimately, someone in your organization needs to be in charge of the customer story.  This could be the CMO or VP of marketing.  It could also be on the communications or PR side.  It doesn’t really matter, except that you need to find a chief content officer that is consistently looking for the story in your customers and employees, and coming up with ways to share that with the world.  Everyone in your organization is responsible for portions of the story, but someone needs to drive it.

Your job as a CEO is to make sure the company understands that you are behind the power of storytelling in your organization.  Look for incentives on how to get employees involved in helping you tell that story, along with ways to propel customers to help tell your story for you.

Give your marketing team the tools, resources and the ownership to make this happen.  It’s that important.

Joe Pulizzi is Founder of the Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Insti­tute, which includes the inter­na­tional con­tent mar­ket­ing event Con­tent Mar­ket­ing World, Chief Con­tent Offi­cer mag­a­zine, Junta42 ven­dor find­ing ser­vice and blog­ging ser­vice Social­tract.  Joe can be reached at [email protected] and on Twit­ter @juntajoe.