About Social Media Today
Joe Pulizzi, founder of Junta42, quite literally wrote the book on content marketing. Some time back I asked him to write a guest post explaining the difference between conversational marketing and content marketing. He was gracious to oblige and here's what he had to say...
Over the past year, I've had more than a few requests to define the differencebetween conversation marketing and content marketing. It's an importantquestion, since most people consider them the same thing. It's also not easy, since the two are veryclosely related and sometimes can be confused for one another. First, let'slook at the definitions.
ConversationMarketing
According to Wikipedia, ConversationMarketing is defined as "the engagement of social media by a corporation topromote their product or brand. It differs from traditional forms of 'customertouch' because the company may enter into an online dialogue which is storedpublicly in a forum or blog. The company may also take the conversationoffline."
Conversation marketing is an activity, or even marketingtactic. It's customer service through Twitter. It's creating loyal fans viaFacebook. It's building a customer dialogue via blogs and forums. It's settingup listening posts to better understand customer behavior.
Conversation marketing is about employing and leveraging newtechnologies to develop and further relationships, which will then (hopefully)lead to off-line conversations and business transactions.
Content Marketing
Also according to Wikipedia, Content Marketing"subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuableinformation to prospects and customers drives profitable consumeraction…products frequently take the form of custommagazines, print or online newsletters, digital content, websites or microsites, whitepapers, webcasts/webinars,podcasts,video portals or series, in-person roadshows, roundtables, interactive online, email, events."Distribution of content should also include social media channels as well andwherever/however customer and prospects want/need to consume your information.
The way I see content marketing and conversation marketing intertwining isthis: If a company creates a solid content marketing strategy, this should leadto successful conversational marketing tactics.
Whenever I explain social media during my speaking engagements, I refer toit in this manner: Don't get bogged down with a big term like "social media".It's really quite simple. If you are having a conversation with another personand you have something of value to contribute to that conversation, both sidesbenefit and the relationship will most likely continue. If you are talking tosomeone else, but are pitching your products or just talking about yourself andhow great you are, why in the world would someone want to continue theconversation? The relationship most likely ends there.
Now take that scenario online. If you (as a person or company) arecontinually creating valuable, relevant and compelling content, targeted toyour customers and prospects, they will want to have a conversation with you. Successful conversation marketing ispredicated on a sound content marketing strategy. If you don't have thevaluable content to share in the first place, your conversational marketingtactics just won't work.
So, content marketing comes first. It's all about understanding theinformational needs and pain points of your target audience, and then creatinginformation that solves their pain points. That means valuable and compelling"storytelling" as part of your website, white papers, blogs, eNewsletters,eBooks and so on, which then leads to social media distribution.
The sharing of that "story" creates the opportunity to communicate withcustomers and prospects and does one very important thing. It generates trust.You become a trusted content provider, which in my opinion, is THE single mostimportant thing you can do for your business today. Once someone trusts you andwants to have a relationship with you because of that trust, businesstransactions soon follow.
Joe Pulizzi is an author, speaker and evangelist for content marketing. Joe foundedJunta42 Matchhttp://blog.junta42.com.Contact Joe at joe[at]junta42.com or check out his content marketing book, Get Content. Get Customers.
Link to original post
