Pulizzi - Epic content marketing: how to tell a different story, break through the clutter, and win more customers by marketing less

More Praise for
Epic Content Marketing

Joe Pulizzi has made me a content believer! Starting today, we will start to develop our business content with a devoted discipline to behave more like a great media company.

KATHERINE BUTTON BELL,
Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer,
Emerson

Joe Pulizzi may know more about content marketing than any person alive. He proves it in these pages.

JAY BAER,
New York Times Bestselling Author
of Youtility: Why Smart Marketing
Is About Help Not Hype

The future of successful brand building, and especially the art of solidifying the emotional connection between people and brands, will require expertise in Content Marketing. Epic Content Marketing gives all the details practitioners need without overcomplicating.

PROFESSOR JOANN SCIARRINO,
Knight Chair
Digital Advertising and Marketing,
University of North CarolinaChapel Hill

Joe Pulizzi is the godfather of our burgeoning profession of Content Marketing. He lays out the objectives, principles, and core strategies of our field in a way thats easy-to-understand, inspiring, and entertaining. If your company doesnt yet realize that its a media company, with all the challenges and advantages that implies, youre missing the most powerful way to connect with your customers.

JULIE FLEISCHER,
Director of Media & Consumer Engagement,
Kraft Foods

Copyright 2014 by Joe Pulizzi. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-07-181991-6
MHID: 0-07-181991-6

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For Adam and Joshua do or do not, there is no try!

Phil. 4:13

PART I
Content MarketingThere and Back Again

PART II
Defining Your Content Niche and Strategy

PART III
Managing the Content Process

PART IV
Marketing Your Stories

PART V
Making Content Work

Have you heard of SAP? If you are a business professional, then you probably have heard of us. You might know that we are German-based. Maybe you even know that we sell business software that powers the financial and accounting systems of large companies. But we are much more than a German-based software company. And we are much less known to the average consumer.

I bet you didnt know that 80 percent of our customers are actually small or medium-sized businesses. Our software powers 74 percent of the worlds transaction revenue and 97 percent of the 1.8 billion text messages sent every day across the globe. Our customers distribute 78 percent of the worlds food supply, 76 percent of the worlds health and beauty products, 82 percent of the coffee and tea we drink each day, 79 percent of the chocolate, and 77 percent of the beer we drink.

As you can see from the illustrative examples above, our communications challenge is solved through stories. Stories not about what we sell but stories that explain what we do for our customers. We believe that the power of stories lies in making the reader and the consumer part of the story. We believe in Epic Content Marketing.

Stories are nothing new. Theyve been around for as long as we have. The earliest humans gathered around the campfire and figured out that effective storytelling was the best way to pass on the information that was vital for survival. They knew that truly connecting with their audience in an emotional way was a matter of life and death.

Fast-forward 10,000 years or so and we see that the emergence of the web, mobile accessibility, and social media have changed some of the ways we tell stories. It has allowed anyone to become a publisher of content. It allows us to tell stories in as little as 140 characters and six-second videos.

The world is now swimming in content and information. While content consumers are having fun creating and consuming all of this content that moves around the world in milliseconds, marketers and businesses are struggling in a growing battle for customer attention.

The era of one-way, single-threaded, brand-directed mass communications is officially over. And yet most of the content and the messages coming out of businesses today are firmly stuck in the good old days. As marketing tactics have become less and less effective, businesses have responded by creating more and more promotional content that no one wants, no one likes, and no one responds to.