Content Marketing: Treat Your Information Like a Product

Part 2 by guest author Joe Pulizzi, Junta42

How to turn off your customers...

The fact is that consumers are turning away from anything that directly markets to them without first having a relationship with your brand. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to create a sustainable relationship with a customer without first delivering valuable content.

Marketers may long for the good old days of mass marketing, but those days are dead and gone. Those were easier days.

Today, marketers cannot rely solely on creative ads and traditional ad buys, they have to work for it by delivering consistent and valuable information.

To overcome some of these barriers to content marketing, I've been pushing the concept of positioning content marketing as, yes, a product.

What do I mean by that?

When an organization looks at their content marketing as a product, they inherently create a number of initiatives and processes around that product, including:

• Upfront Business Planning
• Product Testing
• Research & Development
• Product Success Measures (marketing return on investment)
• Customer Feedback Channels
• Quality Control
• Product Evolution Planning

I urge you, whatever the role in your company, to look at the information you communicate to customers as a separate product line, worthy of investment, testing and feedback controls.

You are seeing the most successful companies in the world, the likes of Nike and P&G, treat their customer information like a product. And guess what? It's working.

And it can work for you as well.

Joe Pulizzi is founder and chief content officer of Junta42, which recently launched Junta42 Match, an online marketplace to match marketers with qualified content publishers. Read more of Joe's content at the Junta42 blog.

Related Posts:
Content Marketing: You mean give away information without a pitch?
Content Marketing: An easier, softer way to snag clients