Why customer-centric online content is crucial, especially in this social media day and age

Visitors of this blog know I have been posting a lot about the importance of content, as I did in Dutch before, and have been interviewing quite some people on the matter too, like recently Joe Pulizzi, Bryan Eisenberg and Christopher Knight.

And, as you also know, I often emphasize the importance of valuing the content that’s created by your community, integrating it where you can, link to it, etc. Content is everywhere and content marketing is about integration, strategy and customer-centricity. Finally, I often talk about the importance of relevant (or valuable, if you prefer) and share-worthy content.

User-generated and community-generated content matter very much to me. In several posts, I have gathered comments from “my community” (don’t like the “my” part because it doesn’t belong to me, it’s composed of people that decided to follow my tweets, read my blog, comment etc. but a community is never a “property”) to create new ones.

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Content marketing: an interview with Joe Pulizzi

Joe Pulizzi, content marketing evangelistYou probably know that content (be in the form of newsletter content or white papers, for instance) has been used for ages to build traffic, generate leads, etc.  Who hasn’t used white papers to generate leads? Is anyone doing marketing automation or running websites without content prospects/customers want?

How old the value and importance of content may be (it must be 20 years or so since someone, don’t remember who, said that ‘content is king’), over the last years, there is an increasing attention for content (should I mention social media in that regard?).

However, the real value of content is not just in those tactics. The real interesting part is when you start using content across touchpoints and customer journeys in a consistent and strategic way, also known as content marketing. Content is everywhere in an integrated marketing view and of course online. Web content management is not a new thing. But content of course also has an offline dimension. We have been propagating a smart and customer-centric view of content forever (I even ran a content business for a while) and now someone seems to have taken that message internationally.

Time for an interview with the man who coined the term content marketing, Joe Pulizzi.

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