The 4 Cs of Content Marketing

MK Modern Marketing guide spoof book cover
A post over on hubspot last week was another reminder (not that we collectively need it..) that there’s a lot of channels available now to market / share via.
And you constantly need to stay curious and evaluate which of those could be good for your own objectives and marketing efforts.

The question posed (“is Instagram’s new Pinterest-like web platform worth your time?”) would have sounded like martian to the marketer of a few years back.
Insta-what, Pinter-who?

In those there days we had the 4 Ps to consider.. ‘web 2.0’ and then the advent of social media added a few more to it (and I think the prize for extending the number of Ps you could consider goes to Social Media Today).

Anyway, rather than the traditional 4 Ps and having had ‘stay curious’ pop into my head, I got to thinking about some Cs of ‘modern’ Content Marketing. I’m not attempting to map to the same framework as the Ps but hopefully these might be helpful as a bit of a watchword for your use of digital and social media marketing.

  • Curiosity

– Be curious, Stay curious. It’s the only way you’ll spot that new platform, technique or report that could really help your sales and marketing. Read new books, subscribe to podcasts , get out of the office and talk to people..

  • Content

– The content itself: using the platforms above as an example, Instagram and Pinterest are about photos (mostly) but you might want to add different types of content to each. And will that be as impactful as using video or infographics or long form articles? How do all those work in unison for you? Content planning is a broader job than it was pre-interweb but not an impossible task.

  • Consistency

– You’ve set up a company (or individual) profile on lots of platforms. Keep consistency between each – make sure they’re on brand and on-track with your marketing objectives.

  • Commitment

– Your Facebook page gets woeful interaction. You’re a B2B brand? no brainer – just close it down. No, not really – don’t just pull the plug – it could be it’s the ‘wrong’ platform for you but it might also be that you’re not sending traffic that way, you’re not attracting interest from within Facebook or you’re not sharing interesting content or engaging with your community but just talking at them (or even ignoring them). Same goes for all the other channels.
Trial / use them with some test and learn commitment. Don’t get attracted just by the shininess (think about how you could use them) but then don’t abandon them before they have had chance to prove if they will work for you (and by you I also mean your community / customers).

There’s other Cs – Co-creation (okay, that could fit in Content), Collaboration, Community.. but I’ve gone past my self-imposed list of 4.
What would you have had in there?

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