Perfecting content marketing

Much of my past consultancy work has been with brands and agencies delivering, or looking for, content-driven marketing strategies. This approach of attracting prospects with a rich pool of content that educates or entertains is increasingly the de facto approach for companies’ online marketing, and I remain a huge advocate. I’ve created and assisted with campaigns on this principle that have delivered fantastic results in terms of large volumes of high quality leads. But that’s not to say that content-driven marketing couldn’t be improved.

Today companies have to make a choice:

• Do I give my content away - either from my site or through external network such as YouTube or SlideShare - in return for enhanced search rankings and traffic volumes, or…
• Do I keep it locked behind a content firewall on my site, forcing prospects to give up data in return for access?

Typically the answer is both: companies create pools of content that can be given away free, and accept that they won’t be able to collect any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on the viewers of that content, in return for the knowledge that it will raise their profile. Then they create other content - perhaps richer, perhaps more detailed - and place it behind a form on their own websites so that they can collect some lead information on which to follow up.

In an ideal world, as a marketer I’d like to avoid the trade off. Wouldn’t it be better if I could track who was accessing my free content without putting the barrier of a form in the way?

Certainly this prospect excites my colleagues in the marketing world - enormously. And it’s feedback like that which keeps me drinking the CANDDi Kool-Aid.