If You Write it, They Will Come
An understated fact from this past holiday shopping season was the torrid sales pace of tablet computers, especially iPads and the new Kindle Fire. For anyone watching developments related to content marketing and marketing automation, the news is significant, for these devices are useless unless there is something on them to read.
At least that's one of the findings in this year's "State of the Media Report," which was recently issued by the media tracking and analysis company Vocus. "When people hold a tablet in their hands and seek content to consume, they are willing to pay for it," the report quotes Rebecca Bredholt, managing editor, Magazine Content. The context of the analyses was the iPad's impact on magazines, but the implications of both tablet adoption and the Vocus study reach far wider.
It would seem that humans have an insatiable appetite for consuming media. I would love to see a study on the most prolific iOS apps. Something tells me that beyond apps for searching, the most popular category has to be news (even more so than games). That's because of our innate desire to gather content.
Enter content marketing. No discipline can have a greater impact on both SEO (affecting those search iOS apps) and materials that can be consumed by those tablet devices. Given the value of the content and the insatiable desire by all of us to consume it, consider two other realities: the shrinking universe of professional media and the low-cost of entry for becoming a content producer. The Internet today allows anyone to be a publisher, which means companies have a significant opportunity to fill the void left by shrinking professional journalism staffs.
Companies are hiring journalists to write content for their blogs. Many of Schwartz MSL's clients are signing up for our content marketing services, and we are driving the content creation efforts for them. When done correctly, such efforts aid SEO, increase website traffic, align to other marketing efforts and campaigns, and--when tied to a marketing automation solution such as HubSpot-- ultimately lead to leads and sales.
More fundamentally, the content marketing efforts work because, very simply, people want the content. To radically oversimplify the point, it really is a case of if you write it, they will come.
Tags: content marketing, marketing automation
Posted by Ross Levanto on February 7, 2012 at 9:12 AM
