Content marketing: shut up, listen and be useful.

You wouldn’t make too many friends in life if you kept bursting into people’s homes uninvited, or interrupting conversations to tell everyone just how great you are. Even when the people you’re shouting at show zero interest in what you have to say, you still keep banging on regardless.

But that’s effectively how your brand will be perceived if you adopt a short-term, scattergun approach to marketing, plaguing untargeted audiences with random pop-up ads and irrelevant promotions in the desperate hope that some of it might stick. 

Content marketing on the other hand, takes a more refined approach with a longer-term view. It’s about creating useful information that your target audience is searching for. So instead of an ad promoting the world’s greatest roof mending widgets, you might produce an instructional guide or video showing how to fix a leaking roof using widgets.

High quality, educational content helps your audience to build positive associations with your brand, ultimately leading to sales conversions. It’s nothing new: content marketing can be traced back as far as 1895 when John Deere began supporting customers and prospects with useful articles and agricultural tips in its consumer magazine The Furrow.

We all naturally filter the thousands of messages we’re exposed to on a daily basis, and software is getting better at blocking intrusive ads completely. Which means that the best way to engage is to shout less, understand the problem your audience is trying to solve, and provide them with useful content that helps to solve it.