I admit it: I’m a content junkie. It started when I was a child, and I’ve chosen to spend most of my adult life creating different types of worthwhile content for a variety of audiences. I wear a button proclaiming, “I still read books.” I tend to be online seeking useful content too many hours per day, too many days per week. I drop off to sleep at night with my latest novel in hand—you get the idea.

So, it’s only natural for me to help spread the word about the benefits of content marketing—that is, providing valuable, compelling content with the goal of educating (and even entertaining) people to help them solve a problem or enable them to make a good decision.

What Content Marketing Is—and Isn’t
If you Google “content marketing” you’ll find roughly 523,000 sources that you can access for information about the topic. But some resources are always more valuable than others, so  to get a quick take on content marketing, here are five resources to help you get up to speed on what content marketing is—and isn’t.

1. According to Wikipedia, “Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases. … Content marketing products frequently take the form of custom magazines, print or online newsletters, digital content, websites or microsites, white papers, webcasts/webinars, podcasts, video portals or series, in-person roadshows, roundtables, interactive online [activities], email, events.”

What content marketing is not: Traditional marketing and promotional materials such as advertising or sales brochures

2. Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 (a vertical search site dedicated to content marketing) provides this perspective: “Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. It is non-interruption marketing. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent. The essence of this strategy is the belief that if we, as businesses, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty.”

What content marketing is not: Delivery of information whose only purpose is to pitch or sell products or services, rather than educating buyers over time

3. According to well-known blogger and speaker Chris Brogan, “Content marketing is the ability to produce useful and entertaining information that is worthwhile on its own, but that might also be useful towards a sale or subsequent action. For instance, a really good review of a product from a trusted source is content marketing.”

What content marketing is not: Information that’s perceived as biased or influenced by a particular business with the intent to sell product, rather than objective content that adds to the general knowledge base of an industry

4. Content Marketing Today maintains that to become a great content marketer that can attract and retain a large customer base, think like a publisher:

• First, define a critical group of buyers
• Second, determine what information they really need and how they want to receive it
• Third, deliver that critical info to that core group of buyers in the way they want it
• Fourth, continually measure how well you’re doing and adjust as you go

What content marketing is not: To-the-masses broadcasts that fail to consider whether individual recipients want to receive information and engage with your business and if so, how they want to receive your information

5. And from Valeria Maltoni at the Conversation Agent blog: “Content marketing is … the opposite of interruption marketing. You create great content that attracts customers and prospects, educates them, and potentially engages them in a conversation with you.”

What content marketing is not: One-way communication that emanates from your company—content marketing sets the stage for meaningful conversations and engagement between your business and your customers and prospects

How Your Company Benefits from Content Marketing
Providing valuable and compelling content that is relevant to your customers and prospects and helps them shine is the epitome of good customer service. It says, “We care about you, and our first priority is to help you get the information you need to be effective—whether or not you choose to do business with us today or in the future.”

Providing useful content on an ongoing basis builds trust with your audience and helps establish your company as an authority in your industry. Significant information gets passed along, providing you with more opportunities to engage in meaningful conversations with your customers and prospects—conversations that often open doors to talk about your products and services when it’s appropriate to do so, on an individual basis.

Finally, content marketing is economical. You can use well-crafted content in multiple ways—in your blog, email newsletter, website content, Twitter posts, podcasts, presentations and more. And content marketing provides the means to keep your online presence fresh (which the search engines like) and with a little help from SEO, enables more customers and prospects find you through organic search. Really, with so many benefits and so little to risk, why not give content marketing a try?

It’s early days yet for this blog, but you need to know up-front that in my “other life” I’m a bird-nerd. From time to time I likely will digress into “significant info” about our feathered friends to make a point about significant information for businesses. So, please indulge me for a few paragraphs—my point this time pertains to the need for significant content on your website.

A Truly Remarkable Creature
According to the Otago Peninsula Trust of New Zealand, “A soaring albatross seen against sea or sky is a sight to bring delight, perhaps even inspiration. Elegant, incredibly graceful in flight, seldom flapping a wing, yet dipping and swooping, turning and soaring, the albatross presents a spectacle touched with dignity and majesty no other seabird can excel.”

Albatross: The Bird
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the albatross as “any of a family (Diomedeidae) of large web-footed seabirds that have long slender wings, are excellent gliders, and include the largest seabirds.”

The Wandering Albatross and the Southern Royal Albatross are the largest types of albatrosses and among the largest of all flying birds. They have tip-to-tip wingspans from 9 to 11 feet, and large adult males are heavyweights – 13 to 26 pounds in weight.

The sea and sky are their dominion, and both can travel incredible distances over long periods of time. For example, after leaving a colony as a fledgling, a juvenile bird might spend as much as 6 years at sea before returning and reestablishing its contact with land.

In short, albatrosses are beautiful, long-lived seabirds whose (remember this!) form and function are optimized for the environment they live in—most particularly, the Southern Ocean off South America, Southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica.

Albatross: The Other Meaning
The word albatross has also come to mean something that causes persistent, deep concern or anxiety; something that greatly hinders accomplishment. This meaning evolved in reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In Coleridge’s poem, an albatross follows a ship (a sign of good luck) and is killed by the mariner (which curses the ship), who is forced to wear the dead albatross around his neck (as a punishment and reminder) until all his shipmates die from the curse. So, albatross has also come to be used as a metaphor for an encumbrance or hindrance or a burden to be carried as penance.

What Does This Have to Do with Your Web Content?
Clearly, any content you create needs to emulate the bird, not the metaphor. Your goal should be to create elegant, efficient, satisfying content that is optimized for its environment—namely the Web and your clients’ or prospects’ needs.

Your content needs to create an environment whose form and function model what your customers care about, need and will spend time exploring, engaging with and sharing with their colleagues. The last thing you want your Web content to become is an albatross—in the second meaning—either for your company or for the customers you hope to attract and serve.

sig nif i cant adj. having meaning; important; of consequence; probably caused by something other than mere chance

in for ma tion n.   the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence; knowledge obtained from investigation, study or instruction; news, facts, data, advice

Information – that constant flow of news, facts, data, knowledge, opinions, advice, and more that streams to and from all of us through multiple communications and sensory channels often with the intent to instruct, inspire, enlighten, entertain, or even annoy (Whew!)—too frequently proves to be overwhelming, irrelevant, and simply forgettable.

That’s why creating and communicating significant information—valuable content that resonates with you and me and causes us to pause, contemplate, and act—is more important than ever for businesses to engage in. And connecting directly with clients and prospects to find out precisely what they want from your company—products and services, features and components, content and interactions—also is important and now so much more interesting through social media.

Significant Info (the blog) will explore how to effectively communicate and connect with your target audience through—you guessed it—significant information, especially as it relates to marketing today in the B2B space. We (i.e., most often I) will look at what you need to pull in from your clients and prospects as well as what you need to push out —or better yet—confer and exchange with your target audience to engage with them in the manner they expect and have grown accustomed to. In the process, I hope to provide some thought-provoking and practical information that you can use to persuade the more skeptical that content marketing through engagement is indeed the path that’s worth following.

Your thoughts, ideas, and comments are encouraged and always welcome. And please feel free to connect with me on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Warm regards—Janet Robbins