Marketing 101 – It’s what your brand allows your clients to say about themselves.

Content Rules!

Smart companies know that embracing new media and all of its distribution channels is the communication form of the future. The traditional world of marketing doesn’t cut it any more. We can now skip over advertising on TV, ignore irrelevant ads, and the power of “choice” is greater than ever, in terms of advertising consumption.

This can only be a good thing — it forces relevancy and value to the top of the client experience. In a world of rapid change that is a baseline necessity. Who’s got time to watch things they don’t care about?

People want advertising to be meaningful, they want value and they want it now. That’s the premise that gave birth to the new era of content marketing. Content marketing is a marketing approach that provides consistent reader driven “interesting” content that has the specific goal of attracting and retaining a clearly defined reader or viewer. This in turn, creates reader engagement with the intent to drive client actions in buying directions.

Content marketing strategically architects stories that engage, support or sway public opinion. It’s powerful and it works. Content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without actually selling something. It’s giving clients a choice. It is non-interruption modality that serves the seller and the buyer. There’s reciprocity in the sales equation. I’ll inform you – then you decide if it’s a match for what you are looking for. It has integrity.

Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent about it and therefore creating the environment for informed choice. The essence of this content strategy is the belief that if we, as businesses, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately will do business with us, if it’s the right fit.

And it works. Because what is business anyway if it’s not a network of conversations? The more conversations you have, the more likely you are to achieve an outcome. Content marketing is simply another conversation.

In the oil patch, content marketing is transforming the conversation from “Here’s our mission and what we sell” to “Here’s what happened when we lost all our documents and this is how we rectified it”.

See the difference?

People love the art of story telling. That is the basis of the entire Hollywood entertainment industry. Great stories and great storytellers merge to create the experiences we see at the box office. Here in the oil and gas industry we can learn a lot from the world’s greatest storytellers. Good content marketing will tell stories in such a way that it makes a person stop, read, think, observe, assimilate and often behave in a certain direction.

According to the book Content Rules, authors Handley and Chapman, we cross boarders, time and cultures with content. Articles, blogs, pictures, videos, tweets, and Facebook posts are all part of the multimedia mix. These days, every company has the capability to be their own publishing house and Content Rules is a book that makes the connection between social media and content marketing realm. The purpose of the book is to support businesses just like yours in content creation and the marketing aspect of their business. It’s not an option to be complacent with what you sell, produce or serve — it’s the way of the future to communicate in ways that engage your clients interest and actions. Content Rules says “write the way you speak” and the book provides case studies of the most successful companies that are already publishing great content. This book is an opportunity to learn from the masters.

In the past, companies would build a brand to describe the company and what they do, how they serve or what they sell. Today it’s more about the experience we leave clients with. It’s no longer about what your brand says about you – It’s what your brand allows clients to say about themselves. www.ContentRulesBook.com