Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

What if goals aren’t even sales-oriented? For example, perhaps the need is to demonstrate thought leadership in the industry, to create brand favorability.

Then there are all those “content marketing” how-tos that are channel-, rather than strategy-oriented. Lately, these have been Snapchat-heavy, due to the company’s recent IPO. But just because Snapchat is attracting attention this week doesn’t mean it’s for everyone. (Moreover, Snapchat is more of a channel and a tactic than a strategy.)

These types of prescriptive, formulaic, devoid-of-strategic-oversight articles are what give content marketing a bad name. We’ve entered the eye-rolling phase of content, when noise overwhelms signal.

And we’ve seen it all before. Ten years ago, this happened to social media. The carpetbaggers moved in, and suddenly marketers branding themselves as social media experts were crawling out of the woodwork....

You were not given a content marketing budget in order to create content. You were given one to increase brand awareness and build your sales and marketing pipelines. Using the Content Marketing Pyramid helps you do just that. (For a deep dive, download Curata’s Content Marketing Pyramid eBook.)

The Content Marketing Pyramid enables the development of content and related assets intended to reinforce common messages/themes through multiple content formats, distribution methods, and promotion channels across owned, earned, and paid media.

The Pyramid assures optimal content consumption, reuse, reach and impact. It provides a common strategic process to align different parts of an organization around “content,” ensuring consistency across functional, geographic, and business unit boundaries....

It’s the age of “content strategy” and “content marketing.” Wherever you turn, more and more often, that’s something you’ll hear. ... Engaging in a good content strategy for websites is hard enough; After all, it takes many resources to create content editorial for a simple blog. Why would anyone want to spend time (and probably money) for content to go onto social media? Aren’t we just going to share links and pictures? A large part of your social media campaign should indeed consist of sharing interesting and relevant content, posting statuses or tweets that help users, engaging readers/followers, etc. Content for this is predominantly “sourced,” but how and when you present it also matters. There’s a fair amount of strategy involved; and apart from mere strategy, there’s “content strategy” even for social media.