Hero Marketing Is Dead, Long Live Content Marketing

Your question: “How does content marketing translate to measurable returns quickly?”

My answer: “It depends on the metrics we establish at the onset.”

If you seek an immediate financial return on your investment in content marketing, stop looking. Don’t do content marketing.

You should ignore the opportunity to develop a long-term, 2-way dialogue with your customers. After all, your company exists to sell its product and promote your heroes, not educate, nor empathize with consumers.

Continue making financial commitments to other channels that feel good to you, because you’ve been doing it forever — like printing a big, fat coffee-table catalog. Affluent people still read those according to this AdAge article from August 2011 — but, be sure to read the comments.

Make sure the brochure is laden with pro athletes and language on product features, pricing and “how-to-buy” lingo, too, because everyone loves to sit down with a good book about YOU!

I don’t think so. But if this is your strategy, I’d be interested in understanding your justification for the spend and how you calculate quantifiable return.

We have all come to a point where we’ve ingested too much “hero marketing,” as pro paddler Clay Wright describes it:

“‘Hero’ and ‘we’re number 1′ marketing is dead and we need to move on towards sharing the parts of our [outdoor] lifestyles that are attainable and sharing the feelings and experiences that we seek and have and that everyone can have … In order for people to listen, it can’t be a sales pitch about a product, but needs to be an enticement to the fun you can have with it.”

People respond positively to empathetic listeners and advisers. Content marketing is about empathizing with a person and putting that person’s feelings and needs first.

It’s hard to empathize if your marketing team spends most of its time describing how cool your company is. Instead of marveling over your product’s components and features, spend twice as much time describing the emotional and physical sentiments your customers will feel when they experience your product. Even better, tell the true stories of your customers, or enable them to tell those stories themselves.

When it comes time to measure the results tomorrow, it’s all about the expectations you set today. We’ll talk more on common metrics in the next post.