Content marketing: Old wine in a new vessel
By Francis Moran
Everywhere I turn these days, it seems that content marketing is being touted as the latest must-do for business-to-business technology marketers. And there seems to be considerable angst over how to do it properly.
“Content marketing is a fairly new concept that many marketers are struggling to figure out,” said a post yesterday on business2community.com. In the post, author Rachel Foster reported on a recent survey of LinkedIn’s B2B Technology Marketer’s Group that asked, “Can you use one word to describe the biggest challenge facing B2B marketing today?” A word cloud of the more than 1,000 comments so far clearly shows ROI to be the dominant concern, followed very closely by content.
In a similar vein, in a round-up earlier this month of the biggest B2B marketing disruptions of 2011, Michael Brenner of B2B Marketing Insider said, “People have been talking about content marketing for at least a couple of years. But in 2011, it really seemed to hit its stride.”
I could cite several additional examples, but I think you get my point. According to a large swath of the B2B braintrust out there, content marketing is the greatest new thing, and we’d better all get aboard.
