Let’s start with a super simple definition for content marketing: Content marketing is releasing something interesting that grabs attention for a business and builds trust. That’s it! Easy, right? For some companies, like Red Bull, it means hundreds of staff in professional studios creating multi-million dollar feature films and releasing them for free. For others it means writing blog posts, putting recipes and nice images on Instagram, or recording a podcast. The most important pieces of the content marketing definition are attention and trust.
You want to put out content that helps people, gets them to pay attention to you and your business, and, over time, garners their trust. These people become part of your community, they help promote your content, refer people to your business, and may even become partners or customers. This book is a form of content marketing. If you are reading it, I have your attention. By the end, you will feel like you know me, and you will trust me more than you did before. You will know of my businesses and you will be part of my worldwide community of passionate content marketers.
The idea has been around for hundreds of years. One of the earliest recognized forms of content marketing was a magazine started in 1895 by John Deere called The Furrow. It provided interesting information about farming and built a worldwide following for the brand which continues to this day. With the emergence of the web and social media, content marketing has exploded. The core idea is the same, but the methods for doing it—and, more importantly, doing it well—have changed dramatically.