Towards a Definition of Content Marketing: The Content Grid

June 21st, 2010 by Brian Posnanski

In this era of colliding marketing disciplines, one of the more popular terms that has arisen is content marketing. We like this term, and use it to describe how the content PR has traditionally created – such as news releases, articles, video and case studies – can be marketed to a much wider audience than the journalists and influencers who were once the sole privileged targets of that information. We also talk about the importance of having great content for SEO value.

Then again, “content marketing” means different things to different people, depending on what part of the marketing spectrum you come from. Enter: The Content Grid, a new way to visualize content marketing from Eloqua and JESS3.

We like The Content Grid because it not only distinguishes who should “own” a particular piece of content, but also between content type and content channel. What gets lost in the social media conversation is the central role of content in formulating a voice and a presence. To paraphrase David Meerman Scott, if you are creating a profile or a page on a social network, then you are creating content. In other words, if you’re speaking to the marketplace through Twitter and other social channels without ideas or anything engaging to back it up, you’re talking into a wind tunnel.

We think The Content Grid will stand as a great benchmark for anyone interested, as we are, in the evolution of PR into a content marketing engine.

Tags: Content Marketing, Eloqua, Great Content Migration, JESS3, media, social media, The Content Grid, The New Rules of Marketing and PR