We’ve all read alot about content marketing, and we’ve seen stellar examples, as well as shabby ones. Like all other marketing approaches to engage interest, content marketing is highly effective if offered genuinely without a naked commercial pitch at its heart.
The central idea behind content marketing is to promote oneself or one’s company by offering up valuable content to relevant parties, without a direct appeal to do business. That is to say, content which is clearly valuable on its own merits. And content marketing can be accomplished via credible blogging, creation of case studies and white papers, informational videos and informational webinars, to name but a few means.
On the Web, within an environment so driven by the perception that everything within should be free, content marketing most certainly has found its most effective channel. I’d like here to “tiptoe” along a fine line that explains WebAttract’s approach to promoting itself, without offering it necessarily as a reason to do business with us.
First, let me say that one of our core missions, from the start, is to elevate webinars from their “red haired stepchild” status to a legitimate means to raise brand awareness, enhance thought leadership and drive demand generation. We firmly believe that, by “raising the standard” for how informational webinars are executed, we can collectively, along with our competitors, “raise the tide for all boats”. And, I believe we’ve played a central role in accomplishing that to the degree we can in WebAttract’s relatively short lifespan. In the past 2 years, partly as the result of the recession’s impact on travel and expense budgets and the business world’s demand that marketing efforts deliver measurable ROI, informational webinars have become an important part of many company’s integrated marketing strategies.
Secondly, and more specifically as it relates to WebAttract… We made a decision early on that we would share the majority of our intellectual property with our prospective audience. Of course, if we were nuclear physicists or national security advisors we would not have such an option. But as a marketing services companies, much of what we do is not so much confidential as it is a perfect orchestration of best practices around audience recruitment, impactful live productions, deep domain experience and a burning passion to tell great stories. Not rocket science, in other words…just well executed, with passion.
By “giving it all way”, we have a very unique opportunity to demonstrate our expertise and differentiate ourselves from the “imitators”. AND, whether our IP is used by competitors to validate or fine-tune, or by others who wish to build their own efforts, there’s still plenty of room in the “sandbox” for us all. We don’t want to rule the world…we simply want to enjoy a thriving business with clients we find engaging and interesting and who look to us to deliver a valuable service.
So, at the risk of sounding self-serving, have a look at our blog and our website which are rich with best practices videos, discussions of all the elements of our approach, case studies, white papers, and more. What you’ll find is not a single attempt to capture your contact details in exchange for information, or to engage you in automated chat, or to hit you with localized content based on your IP, but rather a “living case story” of content marketing and the WebAttract philosophy of free. Enjoy! It’s on the house.
Posted by Bret Smith, Co-Principal, WebAttract, LLC