It´s not enough these days to excel in one area of marketing – you´ve got to cover all bases, employing a healthy mix of traditional and digital marketing techniques, otherwise you run the risk of falling off the radar.
Just look at Coca-Cola – its Christmas TV advert is synonymous with that time of year for a particular generation of people, but that doesn´t mean it can afford to live off of that alone. As such, a couple of years ago it ditched its corporate website in favour of brand publishing, launching Journey, which is unmistakably all about the content.
That said, content marketing isn´t as “new” as you might have assumed. As Garret Moon, writing in the Todaymade blog, points out, brands have been using content marketing techniques for decades.
Take The Furrow, for example – a consumer magazine published by US agriculture corporation John Deere. It has been in publication since 1895, offering advice and other articles to farmers and experts in the agriculture industry.
Shortly after The Furrow came into being, Michelin Tyres released a 400-page guide tailored to helping drivers maintain their cars. Published in 1900, the book was not too dissimilar from the “how-to” guides seen on the websites of car insurance firms and the like.
Public relations (PR), another not-so-recent invention that often gets perceived as the opposite, is another practice which compliments marketing efforts quite nicely and therefore cannot be ignored by brands. Whilst social media marketing, which is indeed a more modern phenomenon, has become one of the most important parts of a marketing strategy.
The reason I have cherry picked those three areas (content marketing, PR and social media) is because I wanted to highlight how the components are not as independent of one another as you might think, as the following infographic from “demand marketing” agency Onboardly highlights. Demand marketing is what the agency calls it when the three facets come together, making for the foundation of a rather solid marketing campaign.
Onboardly says demand marketing “is easy as relating all the pieces to parts of a ship” – with the ship analogy acting as the theme for the infographic. Take a look and tell us your thoughts on whether the three really do need to be interlinked as suggested, or whether you can make it so they work independently of one another…
