Content Marketing From The 1950’s

Correction: This ad is from the 1940’s as Someone on linkedin pointed out it discusses sugar rations, which places this ad around world war two. 

One of my passions is collecting vintage advertising in magazines from the last century. I don’t recall where this magazine ad ran, but it was likely a magazine from the 1950’s targeting housewives. Those are the best magazines to flip through for ads. The saying goes there is nothing new under the sun, well, whats your excuse for not doing content marketing?

How long does a strategy have to be around for you to get with the program???!!!

Content Marketing goes way beyond offering a free book in exchange for permission to market to you, but this is pretty much considered a best practice with B2B marketing. Offering Information of Value in exchange for contact info.

Is it really that difficult to develop personas for your audience, map out their customer journey, understand the sales funnel, and create valuable content to bring them into the funnel and engage them with marketing automation and drip campaigns of more valuable content to bring them deeper into the funnel until they convert?

Ok, maybe its not so easy, but why haven’t you started on this yet? atleast create the content that will establish yourself as a subject matter expert so they will trust you when they are ready to buy?

Do you think it’s a coincidence that direct response marketers, who focus on ROI invest so heavily in sequences, and content creation. Look at Dan Kennedy. He wrote dozens of books, puts out multiple monthly newsletters, several conferences a year, bootcamp programs, etc… Sure, he is an info-marketer, so his business is selling information. If anything that should sway you the other way. The biggest info marketers, launch with a sequence of premium content for free and than sell their pricey information.

If The Guys Selling Information Give Some Away For Free, Wouldn’t It Make Sense That You Should Too? 

 Content marketing is all the rage today, but why wasn’t it all the rage 60 years ago when KARO offered a free book on Canning finer fruits?!

Maybe measuring the true ROI of people who interact with your content may be difficult without full funnel attribution or even first click attribution, but there is no doubt when you look at the point from being a small business to being a powerhouse, a comprehesive content strategy goes a very long way.

Perhaps if you can’t measure the value of your content marketing, the problem is in your distribution and content promotion strategy rather than in the effectiveness of your content.

The bottom line is that a long term content strategy executed well is by far much more profitable than any other marketing that I know of… short of delivering an exceptional customer experience to every customer?