What Forms of Content Marketing Work Best?

January 31, 2010

Content management marketing is more and more a hot topic for marketers. The basic idea is to become THE publishing company for your target audience by being the source of information for them. As we help our portfolio companies with their content marketing strategies, the first obvious missing ingredient is a content creation engine.

Our first recommendation is to start content management marketing efforts by getting your ideas out of your heads and onto your website through blogging. Blogging is a great vehicle for getting your ideas onto the table and the readers don’t expect perfectly edited copy or perfect graphics as they do with whitepapers or other forms of content packaging. Also, if you use Compendium as your blogging platform, they nicely package your content in a way that search engines can find you more easily. Finally, after you blog for a while, you will have a great source of ideas and inspiration for more structured articles, whitepapers, e-books, videos, and other forms of content management marketing.

What do you do next? Junta42 recently completed a survey of what others are expecting to do. My read of the favored forms of content is that they are in line with what seems to be working for other companies. The key, of course is to have a sharp focus on your target customers, find out what they find useful to them, and then to create content about it (btw, it is probably NOT your product marketing material). The packaging of the content, the topics of the content, and all other aspects will become clear if you experiment and measure the results of your work….

Founder & Partner

As the founder of OpenView, Scott focuses on distinctive business models and products that uniquely address a meaningful market pain point. This includes a broad interest in application and infrastructure companies, and businesses that are addressing the next generation of technology, including SaaS, cloud computing, mobile platforms, storage, networking, IT tools, and development tools.