Content is still king, sort of.

By Jerry Rackley

Let there be no doubt: Demand Metric believes that content is king. There’s no other way we could feel, since our business plan is predicated on content. If we’re not providing premium content that pulls members into relationship with us, we have no web traffic, no revenue, no salaries, no company car or keys to the executive washroom. Okay, we don’t actually have those last two items, but you get the message that we are “all in” when it comes to content marketing.

Being the devotees of content marketing that we are, we drink the content marketing Kool-Aid. At the risk of sounding heretical, the question I’ve recently pondered is this: is content really king? In this age of buyers who educate themselves using many information sources before they ever engage with you, how important is content, really? Very, and you’ll get no argument from me about that. But there’s something more important: expertise.

Content may be king, but expertise rules. Content is information. When content distills subject matter knowledge in a way that is useful, practical and accessible, then it becomes expertise. This distinction is where marketers can really add value through their work.

The job of publishing and managing content usually belongs to the marketing organization. The expertise that goes into that content often exists outside the marketing department. Marketing’s job in content curation is to gather, edit, filter, position, disseminate, measure and report. Sure, there’s a creation component as well, but it’s easier and more effective for marketing to serve as the conduit through which the organization’s expertise becomes content.

Companies that publish high quality content as part of their marketing strategy will enjoy a competitive advantage. A critical component of content quality is expertise. Demand Metric provides a set of Content Marketing tools and templates to help you execute your strategy, and the Content Quality Checklist can help you make sure that content meets or exceeds your standards for it.

A focus on delivering expertise through your content will ensure that it has value and that it doesn’t just become digital pollution on the information superhighway.