I’m going to walk you through a little exercise.

Fire up Google and search for content marketing strategy. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Scanning the first few results, I’d wager two words popped up again and again: Valuable and relevant.

In fact, both of those words are baked into the definition of content marketing presented by the Content Marketing Institute, “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

The driving principle behind content marketing isn’t really about marketing at all.

It’s about producing and distributing information-rich content to your intended buyer to make them better informed about the stuff you sell.

The logic goes something like this: If an organization/brand/company delivers valuable information — consistently — to their current and prospective buyer, those buyers will reward said knowledge share with their hard-earned dollars and, perhaps more importantly, their loyalty.

There have been scads of case studies written about the major successes brands of all sizes are seeing through content creation. It’s driving sales, generating leads, and teaching brands some interesting things about what makes their target audience tick — in short, how they behave. (more…)