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Lexicon and Marketing Strategy Essay Content Marketing

Hames Ellerbe

Marketing, Media, and Communication II

February 14, 2017

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Lexicons explored

Strategic Planning is an organizational management activity, which is used to set priorities, focus resources, and strengthen operations. The planning works to make an agreement on the desired results and what to change, should an issue arise. Strategic planning is an effort that makes decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, who it serves, what it does, and why it does it; focusing on the future.

Medium(s) are the materials or platforms used to create a work of art, design, or information.

Social Media are forms of electronic communication (as websites for social networking and micro blogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos).

Visual Impact is the first thing we work toward in a design and is also an aspect of design marketing collateral with a strong mental picture effect.

Perception is the way of regarding, understanding, or interpreting something; and is the base for content marketing.

Content is the information portrayed in a work.

Emphasis is the exaggeration of words or an aspect of a design in a text or design with a different style to have words or aspect stand out.

Content Marketing

Organizations neglecting marketing often, are on a crash course for failure. Marketing is the process for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large (American Marketing Association [AMA], n.d.). Successful businesses utilize marketing to gain acknowledgement, increase sales, and Ellerbe 3 promote their brand. Moreover, through marketing, businesses have the capability of reaching as large an audience as desired or seems monetarily feasible. Furthermore, marketing campaigns can be highly unsuccessful and gain important brand recognition for the organization.

Campaigns, both successful and unsuccessful, are highly useful market analysis tools; teaching marketers what to research and market in the future. Within the constructs of marketing, lay a variety of subsets, which can be implemented as individual marketing strategies. While these strategies all work together to create an effective marketing plan, content marketing is one of the most effective strategies in modern marketing, vitally assisting to establish the brand. Content

Marketing is about attracting an audience to an experience that you own, build, and optimize to achieve your marketing objectives. Simply put, the strategy displays that a company that ‘walks the walk’ or illustrates an approach that is about the consumer.

Content marketing is defined as "a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience—with the objective of driving profitable customer action” (Content Marketing Institute [CMI], n.d.).

The strategy is fundamental to marketing, as specific, valuable, consistent, and relevant content needs to be conveyed for an effective perception. Perception is how the public and consumer view a company or marketing campaign. Furthermore, content marketing often gets confused with advertising, which is “the placement of announcements and messages in time or space by business firms, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and individuals who seek to inform and/ or persuade members of a particular target market or audience about their products, services, organizations, or ideas" (Advertising, n.d.). While the two both use content strategy determined by marketing and brand directors, they are complete contrasts of one another. While advertising is company focused, on the other hand content marketing is consumer focused. Ellerbe 4

Uniquely successful content marketing can be traced from the dawn of man using a simplistic bartering system through to the exciting and content heavy modern era.

Ultimately, Content Marketing began when cave drawings appeared, with what

Archeologists have loosely translated to “6 Ways a Spear Can Save Yourself From Wild

Boar”(CMI, 2015). The strategy evolved to a more modern form beginning in 1895 when John

Deere launched a customer magazine called The Furrow, which currently has “1.5 million in circulation, represented in 40 different countries” (CMI, 2015). “The Furrow didn’t just push advertisements of John Deere products — it provided valuable information and stories for consumers to enjoy. The magazine forged a relationship of trust and dependence between the

John Deere brand and its audience through the expert advice the magazine published”(White,

R.L., n.d.). Slightly after the turn of the century, consumer publications were produced in masse, with targeted campaigns presented in through the proper medium. An example of successful period targeting campaigns is the Jell-O advertisement published in the popular, The Ladies

Home Journal. “Jell-O created content that was appealing and useful to the ideal buyers: the housewife, consumers they approached face-to-face, and readers of The Ladies Home

Journal”(White, R.L., n.d.). The production of these ads had substantial visual impact, leading to over $1 million in increased sales. Visual Impact is how the content of a visual medium impacts or connects with the viewer, and is the driving force in the production of content. A strong visual impact in content will lead consumers to a conscious or subconscious decision regarding the content of a particular message.

Content marketing developed quickly over the next twenty-five years, through various print campaigns. Additionally, as technology began to grow, the invention and popularity of radio came to the forefront of content marketing. Radio brought on a new medium for which Ellerbe 5 content marketing can be displayed. Mediums are the materials or platforms used as means for achieving a task or conveying; examples of mediums are Facebook, canvases, photographs, print magazines, television, and can even be as broad as technology. Additionally, the invention of the radio medium reaching the ears of consumers became a core pursuit for marketers.

Branded content on the airwaves began to spread, and in 1933, Procter & Gamble began

broadcasting a radio serial drama sponsored by their Oxydol soap powder, and called

“Oxydol’s Own Ma Perkins.” The show was timed to air during the day and was targeted

to appeal to women — primarily housewives — who were the ideal buyer demographic.

In breaks during the show, Procter & Gamble would advertise its soap products, which,

due to the popularity of these radio shows, eventually led to the term, “soap

opera”(White, R.L., n.d.).

The birth of this technology gave the marketer multiple mediums in which to develop content.

Marketers could now begin targeting particular audiences and consumers based on the specific publications consumed as well as targeting geographical locations and preferred medium.

Fast forward to the fifties. This time was marked by a skyrocketing rise in advertising and a significant decline in content marketing. Lines were established in marketing.

Consequently, advertising was used solely for product selling, while content marketing was used for selling solutions. As a relevant example think the AMC show “Mad Men”, where advertising addresses the company instead of the consumer. However, content marketing did not dissipate completely. The “Mad Men” advertising tactics of the fifties set the stage for the next step in content marketing. Correspondingly, the sixties again brought a rise in technology, with the mass usage of television beginning to have effect. This became a time where marketers saw the value of displaying a consistent brand image across all marketing mediums. Moreover, marketers implemented this value with brand consistent multichannel campaigns, displaying a Ellerbe 6

“call to action” concentrated around their logo. Uniquely, Exxon (Esso) created this type of campaign by appealing to the customer across multiple channels, staying brand consistent and empowering the consumer. The campaign centered on the logo, a tiger, and the slogan “put the tiger in your tank” with the implication being that the consumer purchasing Exxon gasoline will realize a more powerful and efficient vehicle. Consequently, “This turning point is critical the history of content marketing. It set a precedent for using the same message across many different channels, a habit marketers have struggled to buck despite the ease of distribution offered by digital communication” (White, R.L., n.d.).

(H. 2015)

Although many extensive examples could be given to the next steps in content marketing, the largest significance came through the rise of yet another technology, the Internet. The

Internet lead to the “democratization” of marketing, breaking the hold advertising held on the industry. Additionally, marketers found, through the Internet, they could shed traditional channels if desired and focus solely on Internet channels. Email newsletters dominated the early days of content marketing through the Internet. The creation of Blogs, which is an informal website typically written through a conversational style, set the course for modern content Ellerbe 7 marketing. “Blog posts are a sum of content marketing’s parts, often combining the statistics and research of white papers, eBooks, and case studies with the design of an infographic, but with greater length than social media posts and greater personalization than website content”

(White, R.L., n.d.). Additionally, following the Internet revolution of the nineties, the aughts introduced the powerful social media networks. Social Media are forms of Internet applications through which users create online communities to share information. Channels such as Twitter,

Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram presented opportunities for companies to engage existing and grow their consumer bases. Moreover, the difference between social media marketing and content marketing is very important. Social Media Marketing varies from content marketing by limiting the strategy to the social media channels. However, content marketing is spread through a variety of channels and focuses more on demand generation, where as social media focuses on brand awareness and consumer relations. Content marketing has seen a huge increase in usage by brands around the world. “About 88 percent of B2B companies and 78 percent of B2C companies reported using content marketing in 2015. Experts forecast that content marketing will be a $300 billion industry by 2019” (White, R.L., n.d.). Considering this, marketers need to keep awareness of the expanding market, curating the channels that are used, and not succumbing to throwing content into every new channel created.

Content Marketing is increasingly important to companies, consumers, and marketing efforts distributed to those consumers. Content, which is information disseminated in a work, has a massive influence on this type of marketing, and is determined through a companies strategic planning. Strategic Planning is an organization's process of defining its’ strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy. Usually determined from the management of a company, strategic planning is used to determine the Ellerbe 8 content strategy for marketing, branding departments and campaigns. Moreover, using strategic planning a company determines what content will be used for a content marketing plan and through what mediums the content will be distributed. Additionally, content marketing is utilized throughout social media. Meanwhile, the emphasis, intensity of an expression that gives importance, on the consumer in content marketing substantially affects the consumers perception of the company.

([INFOGRAPHIC] Content Marketing 101, 2015)

Key points exist in maintaining a structurally effective content marketing campaign. To achieve these points, content should be monitored and filtered through channels, utilizing specific channels that are campaign important. When implementing a content marketing campaign, marketers should keep these precedents in mind. Quality content should always be prioritized over quantity of content. Additionally, the content marketing industry is becoming Ellerbe 9 more competitive. With this competition in mind, content marketers should focus not only on quality, but also on consumer resonating content, which focuses on few effective channels rather than marketing across all channels. Due to the importance of quality content, marketers should take extensive measures to gain the knowledge of the proper audience. Accordingly, marketers should be schooled in knowing channels and mediums in which consumers engage and understand what content reverberate with consumers. Alternatively, marketers look to past successes in content marketing for inspiration concerning future endeavors. In addition, marketers need to adapt to the changing needs and technologies of content marketing channels.

Content marketing is a vital component of marketing strategy. If these points are followed and a creative, educated risk taking approach is made; an effective and potent content marketing campaign will be successfully implemented.

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References

Advertising. (n.d.). Retrieved February 07, 2017, from http://www.marketing- dictionary.org/Advertising

American Marketing Association. (n.d.). Definition of Marketing. Retrieved February 07, 2017, from https://www.ama.org/AboutAMA/Pages/Definition-of-Marketing.aspx

Content Marketing Institute. (n.d.). What is Content Marketing? Retrieved February 07, 2017, from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing/

Content Marketing Institute. (2015, June 11). Corporate Storytelling. Retrieved February 07, 2017, from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2012/02/history-content-marketing-infographic/

White, R. L. (n.d). The History of Content Marketing: An Essential Guide. Retrieved February 12, 2017, from https://trackmaven.com/blog/history-of-content-marketing/

Images

H. (2015, November 06). Content Marketing Done Right: 8 Examples You Can Learn From. Retrieved February 10, 2017, from http://marketingland.com/content-marketing-done-right-8- examples-can-learn-149088

[INFOGRAPHIC] Content Marketing 101. (2015, July 02). Retrieved February 10, 2017, from http://cbspulse.com/2015/07/02/content-marketing-language-future/