Digital Content Marketing: It's Only Starting

Inside peek into the world of internet shops

Tony Hsieh's book about his experience at Zappos and a few meetings the last month came together somehow. Until now, it seems like the term "content marketing" and the idea of writing specific articles to influence buyers, was simply an extension of traditional marketing. Some see content marketing as an extension of other form of digital marketing: advertising, newsletters, affiliate, and SEO (plus other formats). But a few comments from marketing managers and Hsieh's book show a slightly different picture. The digital age plus changes in buying behavior are making content marketing not only useful but actually critical. Yet, most traditional marketers and new digital marketers seem unclear on the differences between content marketing is and  other forms of marketing. 

First about the Zappos book, the title is a hint to what to expect from Hsieh. In short, Hsieh took over Zappos CEO position to put the company into a strong position. His efforts were focused on, you guessed it: making the employees and the customers happy. Eventually the company, selling shoes (compared to Amazon selling books), was sold to Amazon for over a billion dollars. At the time, it was Amazon's largest acquisition. The Zappos story illustrate how Hseih clearly understood how a traditional business (selling shoes) needed to do certain things a little differently on the web. What is interesting about the Zappos story is how even recent history in the digital age is useful in trying to predict future developments. Essentially, the Zappos story comes from the "we can sell anything on the internet" that we sold in 'brick and mortar' shops era. The era was also called the dot-com bubble (or euphemistically dot-bomb / the internet bubble). Like most ideas in technology, what was good to do was also good to overdo. But it's nice to see that in all the cacophony of the early internet days, someone kept his head on his shoulders, and feet on the ground and built a real business. So kudos to Tony Hsieh.

The new content marketing movement is similar to other trends. They seem to grow like bubbles, yet eventually become a mainstream sub-sector. The last few years we have seen the social media bubble, and then the mobile connectivity bubble. Before these bubbles we had the blogging and tagging bubbles (see also stumbleupon.com). It seems like content marketing is essentially going back to the early days of company or site owner generated content (in the early days "web masters" were the leaders in the business). Content also meant the management or crafting of messages from related internal sources, what we call today content curation. As opposed to user generated content as in the blogging and social media bubbles. This swing of "who controls the message" on the internet is a reflection of two opposing forces, one the populist side (some call it the democratic voice), the other the elitist or corporate side (some call the the organization, state, or management voice). This view is similar to the traditional media control view, which pitted the creators of ideas and messages (essentially the media and publishing, i.e. advertisers and corporate America) against the popular voice, or the voice of the people (essentially the writers, editors and publishers). The digital version of this tug-of-war is what we see going on again in content marketing. Essentially the organization or the source voice going up against the populist voice of social media.

The last few weeks my work turned into looking for new clients and interviewing for a possible full time position. Since the world of internet content creation is still new and fresh, there are many different titles for the kind of job I can do. But even more interesting is how different hiring managers and CEOs (of small companies) perceive content marketing. The internet and mobile communication is changing almost everything we do. Some things are almost the same (writing, editing, advertising), but some things are completely new. One aspect of content marketing which should not be new: the use of writing and graphics to explain products, features, benefits, and uses. Although the digital medial gives marketers essentially infinite "canvas", writing to convince customers is not new. Traditional (paper based) newsletters and long form direct mail pieces are very similar to what blogs are doing today. At the same time, content marketing is different than advertising and short copyrighting marketing. Here is where most business managers and even marketers have a problem. The shift to massive amount of text, more focused subjects, more and very specific detail, is something that most traditional managers have to understand.  Essentially this is the core of using content to market over other forms of digital formats.

Back to the title: "... It's Only Starting". Looking back on my work the last two years, content marketing as a profession and a role is still new. Content marketing may be considered a standard term in the industry's jargon (the internet sector). As jargon goes, it comes from the sector's technical side. The side of the Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube developers. The ones which put up "empty" sites and somehow hope that "if you build it, he will come". This approach is just one side of the internet business world. The other side of creating massive, targeted, and effective content to influence buying is still very young. As Tony Hsieh has shown, even replacing brick and mortar stores with online equivalent is not simple. The trends we have seen in sales sites (Amazon, EBay, Zappos) had a bubble of excitement, but there is still more opportunities. The recent bubbles in social media applications (Facebook, YouTube) and mobile connected applications (Twitter, Instagram) are also an indication of the potential for content marketing to become a mainstream sub-sector. If you have a need to influence, inform, and eventually lead people, get started with content marketing. In this fast moving world, earlier you get started, better are the odds of leading the pack.