Content Is King! Context Is Queen!

The IX Mutant Print-for-Profit Muses:
Relevance, Interaction, Integration, Engagement, Dialogue, Content, Context, Metrics and ROI.

Content is King! Context is Queen! So C² is our key to new business!

Let’s start with some basic definitions.

What is content marketing?
As defined in Wikipedia, content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

What is content? Should it be relevant?
Recently, I attended an event during Adweek in New York City, MMS (which was once called Mobile Marketing Summit but is now known as the Modern Marketing Summit). “Relevance’’ was an ongoing word used throughout the many presentations by executives from Unilever, Coke and Marriott. The same is true for context as well — think relevancy! #thinkrelevancy

What is context marketing?
Context marketing is a set of best practices designed to amplify the value of your content to your prospects and customers. More specifically, it involves using known qualities of your prospect to either present your content in a frame of reference so that its presence makes it natural, noteworthy and useful or to juxtapose your content so that it creates dissonance. Check out the image connected to this blog. It would create contextual dissonance no matter how it's used.

To me, content and context relate to the printer’s product. Print providers offer many of the same “internals” that are offered by content. Print is a marketing tool, a process. Better still, it is a communications process that creates, deploys, and distributes relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage the end user, customer, or client. Print also provides the endgame — the action item that will allow the sales process to be started and completed or an action that is started in order to activate a lead.

If you have content, then why do you need print?
I am often asked this question today: “Is print still valid?” After the many recent documented challenges to the world of digital marketing, one would and should say print is more valued and valid than ever before. For me (and it should be for you), print is not only the carrier of content, but it is the content itself. WHAT? Let me explain. Print — by using many of the haptic, creative, interactive, dimensional, personalized, and exciting techniques available — is content. The properly developed print project fulfills not only the definition as stated above but also provides the “known qualities” that cannot only carry your clients’/customers’ content, but also adds power to the delivery of the content via the very vehicle itself — the printed piece or printed product.

One can argue that reading content is a mental action, while touching content is a sensory experience, I argue that if you “sell the print solution” as content (mental) reinforced by content (sensory), you and your client/customer cannot lose.

According to SAPPI’s “A Communicator’s Guide to the Neuro Science of Touch,” “more than half the brain is devoted to processing sensory experience.”

This statement and this article are a Win/Win for the printer and print provider as well as for the user of print.

Content is the message, and print is the delivery device of the content and message, Say that 100 times, and (wham!) the mantra fulfills itself.

Content is only one part of a self-promotion!
Self-promotion — new business programs for printers — is, as I view it, a tough task to undertake, often rushed, never fully completed, and many times vague in purpose. Why? Simply many printers provide content that relates to themselves and rarely sell the CORRECT SOLUTION to the CORRECT VERTICAL. In addition, the tool they use to deliver the content often does not reinforce, strengthen, or emphasize the content or message. Many use email or social media as well as print, but the print programs that I have seen are standalone and not integrated with any of the selected media, and they have not been integrated with the CORRECT CONTENT in an effective manner.

Content for the print provider when selling a solution to the CORRECT vertical must mimic the 6 steps that are the foundation of advertising and marketing. When “talking the talk,” the print provider needs to assure that its message/content (1) builds a level of awareness, (2) engages customers’ interest, (3) is considerate of the needs of the CORRECTLY targeted vertical, (4) provides the ability or allows intent to be in play, (5) offers self-evaluation tools and, if all this done correctly, (6) enables the purchase to be made in a simple and effective manner.

Content plus consistency and targeting across the seven pillars of sales promotion is a WIN/WIN/WIN!

Consistency in message
Content is also an area of weakness for most print new business campaigns. In my most recent article for marektingtechnews.net, I discuss the need for corrective marketing.

Corrective marketing is tool that allows the marketer — in our case, the printer or print provider — to make the required changes not only in direction but also in content/context across their entire organization, including media selected and used.

Content is like a story – NO, it IS the story!
Think very hard about what you do and what you offer. And think VERY HARD about your textual and sensory content. Both need to be fully integrated and converged across the entire spectrum of your business base. Without total integration of the copy content and the delivery content, your new business efforts will fail across the board.

Summary
Stop thinking of content as only the letters, word, sentences, and stories that your sales material includes. Start thinking about content as all of that plus your personal B2B delivery mechanism that — when linked to your products, solutions, and service — will deliver the CORRECT content to the CORRECT market via the CORRECT media.

Next up: Context, or addressing the CORRECTNESS of your messaging.

Accept my offer for a free, no-obligation 30-minute phone call to discuss your needs and learn how my process will add benefits to your efforts. Please feel free to email me at thad.kubis@tifmc.org.