5 reasons to love content marketing

TL;DR

• Content creates and boosts authentic experiences
• Content marketing is both creative and quantitative
• Writing has a long history of disrupting the status quo

I’m a content marketer—content marketing is my trade but writing is my craft. (Yes, I over-edit my WhatsApp messages and other throwaway text 🤦‍♀️) For what is great writing without turbo-charged marketing to put that content out into the ether?

I get to stay at home all day for the purpose of making and distributing great content. How cool is that? Here are five things that I love most about content marketing—

1. Content creates user experiences

The best content doesn’t feel like a marketing experience. What’s the last website—or YouTube video or webinar—that you consumed for hours because it was so beneficial to you? For me, it was probably some great piece of content about SEO or (my guilty pleasure) the advice column Dear Prudence.

Exceptional content drives authentic user experiences. Why? Because great content is—

• Accessible: Great content is easy to start consuming, easy to keep consuming, and doesn’t ever drag. Even subject matter novices should be able to understand—and enjoy reading!—your highly accessible content.
• Informative: The best content teaches you something new, whether that’s a neat anecdote, an intriguing fact, or a broad philosophical concept that changes your entire worldview. All in a day’s work for great content.
• Engaging: Are you enjoying reading this blog so far? I sincerely hope so. Highly engaging content feels like it was created for you and only you, or tells a story in a way that’s sure to draw you in.
• Current: Nobody likes to consume stale bread—same goes for old content. Great content is fresh, or constantly being refreshed. (Pro tip: Content recycling is your friend!)

With so many ways to make great content, your most important question to ask is what types of experiences you want your target audience to have. Then you can craft content designed to create and enhance those experiences.

2. Content creates value

I enjoy planning, producing, and distributing content because I know that it creates lasting value in the form of a positive return on investment (ROI). Content marketing strategies are like tropical fruit trees—they take time to bear but ultimately yield in abundance for many years.

But how much value does a piece of content really create? The short answer is it depends, and the long answer is it depends on several factors including—

• Content type: Different types of content—like blogs, emails, and videos—produce different ROIs. News content also has a different financial return profile than evergreen assets.
• Content visibility: Optimizing a content piece for Google search and distributing it to all the important channels are both imperative actions for generating maximum value from content.
• Content optimization: Content can continue to produce value over time if it is updated and optimized. Optimizing content includes keeping the host website in good technical condition.
• Buyer journey: Customers with long buyer journeys likely need to consume multiple pieces of content or engage with a brand on several channels before becoming ready to purchase. Products with long buyer journeys generally require the most content.
• Business metrics: The monetary value that a piece of content can ultimately produce is also impacted by a couple of important business metrics—the lead conversion rate of the sales team and the average per-customer revenue generated by the service or product. The content generates the leads, and then it’s (mostly) on the sales and product teams to maximize customer value.
• Cost of production: The ROI produced by any content piece accounts for the cost of producing the piece. Many marketing teams choose to hire contract-based freelance writers to minimize costs of production.

If you like formulas, then you’ll love that content marketers can use an ROI equation—with many variables!—to determine the value generated by a single blog or content piece. What’s qualitatively clear is that content marketing creates an abundance of value, usually over time. Sometimes the full extent of that value can be challenging to measure.

3. Content marketing has some surprising history

You may think that content marketing is new, perhaps starting with the rise of bloggers and the internet. But you would be mistaken! When I first learned the history of content marketing, I was delighted to tap into the roots of this profession.

Let’s take a look at some of the early success stories in content marketing—

• Old Farmer’s Almanac: Ben Franklin’s famous agricultural almanac, first known as Poor Richard’s Almanack, was launched by the inventor and entrepreneur in 1732 as a content marketing strategy. The popularity of the almanac spurred substantial growth in Franklin’s newspaper and paper mill businesses.
• The Furrow: The tractor company John Deere was another early content marketer, starting a farming-focused magazine in 1895 called The Furrow. The goal of The Furrow is “to tell stories that people enjoy reading.” Like the Old Farmer’s Almanac, The Furrow is still published today.
• The Guiding Light: Ever wonder why soap operas are named as such? That’s because these juicy daytime dramas were originally sponsored by soap companies, with storylines meant to captivate soap-buying moms. Procter & Gamble began sponsoring The Guiding Light on radio in 1937, and moved the series to television in 1952.

Print advertisers in the 1950s and 1960s began using content marketing strategies to tell visual stories. Brands like Coca-Cola and Marlboro were among the first to use memorable campaign images to create lasting emotional connections with their audiences.

4. Content strategy is hard

Another major reason why I love content marketing is because it uses both sides of my brain. My left brain is going to break that down into two lists for you, and the right side of my brain will fill in the interesting details—

Just kidding. Producing great content is a creative process, and content marketers must be able to quantitatively prove their value. Content strategy is hard because opportunity cost is real—an organization typically cannot produce every type of content for every channel all at once. Content strategy gets a lot easier once you learn to prioritize your organization’s key business needs.

Like checklists? Here’s a handy cheat sheet to determine which content marketing metric to prioritize based on your business objective—

5. Writing is a worthy craft—and pretty fun

I’ve identified as a writer since about age 16. I love content marketing because it enables me to write a lot, and for a medium (the internet) that people actually read. My biggest secret to creating great content—I have a few!—is that I genuinely enjoy producing it. What’s fun to write is likely enjoyable to read.

Writing itself also has a long history, to which I feel privileged to add. The earliest known writing dates back to around 3400 B.C.E. and emerged as a way for Sumerians—in the region that’s now the Persian Gulf—to account for business transactions. Writing has since evolved to serve many purposes, and new distribution channels such as paper, printing presses, and social media have made the written word ubiquitous and impossible to ignore. Writing has long been a powerful driver of disruption and social change, and could be considered as one of the earliest decentralized technologies.

I’m not sure if the pen is mightier than the sword, but its ROI is probably much better.