A recent post on Digiday by Mauria Finley, founder and CEO of Citrus Lane, reinforces what we have been saying for some time: that content marketing can be a significant driver of sales. Notes Finley:
The line between editorial content and marketing has never been thinner. Brands are telling their stories through content – creating and distributing articles, posts, photos and videos across social sites and via native ad placements. Or they’re going even further to become all-out publishers, in the way that Johnson & Johnson runs BabyCenter.com, for example.
Importantly, this holds for the business-to-business sector as well as business-to-consumer, something we’ve experienced as writers for a number of major industrial concerns who publish their own media assets on a regular basis. In fact, the emergence of editorial-focused corporate media, either independently or through established publishers, is something that is becoming rather a trend.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Today’s business consumers are as skeptical as their general brothers and sisters in encountering content that smells strongly of advertising bias. The key is provision of relevant content, informed content, and useful content— with an objective orientation that the consumer will read with more interest and less skepticism.
Achieving the balance necessary is not a simple task, and why we believe that organizations are wise to turn to experienced business journalists to produce such work.
This is what we do, and if you’d like to know more about how this approach to content can benefit your communications, we’d love to talk to you about it.