It always makes me smile when I read articles about content marketing which aren’t addressing any marketing manager I’ve ever met: i.e. the type of person who’s usually unsuccessfully trying to shoehorn a couple of hours of original writing into their weekly job schedule.
One article recently referred to a company’s ‘content marketing teams’. That’s right – it was assuming the reader was not only doing this full time, but was part of a team of people all doing this full time, and that team was not the only one at the company.
Companies which can devote many hundreds of hours a week to something like content marketing, with many people involved, clearly exist, although I’ve never worked with one. And most people who write content about content marketing are probably angling to get consultancy work at these sorts of businesses, so they won’t be interested in you or I. However, there are some occasional useful tips we can get from listening into their rarefied conversations.
There’s an example here. The article was created to promote a conference about content marketing, and asked industry experts to comment on the subject*. While most of the submissions aren’t going to make you drop your bacon sandwich, it’s an example of the sort of content which you can skim through and – just maybe – find something which at least makes you think. We should all be reading around the different parts of what we do for a living, even when most of what’s published is a long way from the world we inhabit.
(*Asking people for tips and combining them to make an article is a great way to create useful ‘content’, by the way, because who wouldn’t want to offer something good in exchange for being listed as an industry expert? Maybe you could create something similar from people you know, including customers!)