The Centipede Strategy for Content Marketing

 

    Published on February 6, 2017 Mohanbir Sawhney

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/centipede-strategy-content-marketing-mohanbir-sawhney

Read the article for an explanation of the centipede metaphor.

Why Content Matters

Marketers have traditionally focused on pitching the features and benefits of their offerings in their marketing communications. But modern marketers understand that this approach is swiftly losing its effectiveness in digital media channels, where customers have the choice to tune out promotional messages. The new approach, called Content Marketing (or Inbound Marketing), focuses on creating, curating and delivering content that customers find useful, timely and relevant. A key tenet of Content Marketing is to think about Return on Engagement (ROE) - What value do customers get from consuming your content?

You can provide Return on Engagement to customers in many ways - by giving them useful information, by solving a problem for them, by making their life more convenient, by entertaining them, by inspiring them and by connecting them with communities that they care about. In content marketing, you need to start with a pain point or a passion point that is important for your customers. Then you need to design your content around this pain point or a passion point….

…The Content Paradox

Content marketing is a powerful approach to engage with customers, but there is a problem. In the days of mass media, content used to take the form of a few carefully crafted advertising messages created for television, print or outdoor media….

…Media consumption has fragmented across a variety of social platforms and media is often consumed in very small chunks in "micro-moments" that happen hundreds of times a day as consumers compulsively interact with their smartphones. The implication - content in micro-moment world needs to also become "micro-content" - hundreds of small content assets that are relevant in the moment. Marketers need to create enormous amounts of content on a continuous basis and they need to accept the fact that individual pieces of content may have a very short shelf life….

…Content may be ephemeral, but brands need to endure. This is the content paradox - how to reconcile the short life of content with the long life of a brand. Content marketing demands agility and continuous experimentation.