We\u2019ve never been 100% comfortable with the phrase content marketing at Intercom.<\/p>\n
In the space of five years content marketing has gone from promising a new, more authentic way for businesses and consumers to communicate to something with connotations of spam and hoodwinking readers. Innovative companies rushed to create their own internal newsrooms staffed by journalists, only then to have them crank out product announcements and press releases. It’s little wonder many view content marketing as a series of hacks taken straight from a mythical playbook called \u201c0 to 10,000 customers in 5 easy steps\u201d.<\/p>\n
The term \u201ccontent\u201d is problematic. It commodifies the core of what we do, but for want of a better catch-all phrase for the articles, books, podcasts, talks and presentations we create, we all continue to use it. Sidenote: terminology matters. At Intercom we avoid phrases like blogs (to refer to individual posts) and ebooks (a book is a book) as we feel they demean the value of what we\u2019re offering.<\/p>\n
Combine “content” with \u201cmarketing” and you further undermine what you\u2019re creating. The phrase suggests the entire point of the exercise, or at the very least the primary one, is marketing. But if you want to attract people to your product, this is the wrong approach to take. (Matt has explained<\/a> in the past how content fits into the broader marketing mix at Intercom).<\/p>\n There are some companies that are really successful with content marketing driven by aggressive email captures, funnels and A\/B tests; let\u2019s call it playbook content marketing. But there\u2019s also a growing cohort of companies like Intercom who believe that if you focus on publishing great content, you\u2019ll actually need to do minimal marketing to attract people to your product (Figma<\/a> and Algolia<\/a> are two examples that spring to mind and of course Basecamp<\/a> pioneered this approach). Our experience has been that by focusing on the content first, you can be far less aggressive trying to convert visitors.<\/p>\n And we\u2019re not the only people thinking this way:<\/p>\n You know what would be nice is if we would just call content marketing what it is\u2014brand publishing\u2014and use normal editorial job titles.<\/p>\n \u2014 Kristina Halvorson (@halvorson) May 1, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n