What is content marketing supposed to be anymore?
By: Andy Shaw
Tags: Digital Marketing, Blogging For Business, Content Marketing, Marketing, Content Strategy

Tracking came for content. And won.

And then, as content moved to the side for metrics, another king took the throne like the Mother of Dragons. It came in the form of tracking pixels and third-party cookies and remarketing ads and advertisers who knew you had a pair of shoes in your cart that you better keep there because we see you over at this competitor’s site, cheating on us like a jaded prom date.

It came with demand side platforms and machine learning and algorithms and deregulation and Congressional testimonies and ad blocker removal pop ups and drip marketing campaigns after you asked for one piece of free info and now they know you exist forever.

It was the content not being a story anymore.

It was the content being a means to find out that you, in fact, are someone who is interested in this piece of information, and now we know one more thing about you.

Make that two things: We know your IP address.

Make that three: We know what town you live in.

Make that four: We know what website you visited next.

Make that five: We also have a good idea what device you have, and can probably figure out what devices other people in your house have.

Make that six: We can also figure out how old you are, whether you are into sports, your shopping preferences, and how likely it is that you’ll be coming back to this page.

Less story. More like an investigation.

Sometimes, it’s all used for pure purposes, even helpful purposes. It gets content in front of the right person at the right time — the right email, the right pitch, and the right phrase.

Sometimes… we’re hoping a metric makes up for a lack of imagination.

Will content marketers ever again remember their real audience?

I miss the story.

I miss writing a piece of content that readers across the country (even across the world) would log in to read and then — and this is true, kids — they’d leave multi-sentence comments beneath it. And then I’d reply to those comments. And we’d share a moment, or start a conversation, or find a common bond.

And I’d check out their blog and discover a whole new human being and way of thinking and hopes and dreams and failures. We wrote openly and freely because you weren’t chasing an audience — you wanted more readers, sure, but in a concrete way because there were names behind those readers and not a series of bar charts or bots. It led to uneven content — sometimes, just shitty writing that wouldn’t pass a 7th grade grammar test. But it meant something to that blogger. And, in the earliest of social media, it meant something to the person behind the profile.

It was a world of Blogspot, where sidebar rolls were busting at the seems with ungodly numbers of links to your friend’s blogs, to your entire library of content, to the earliest versions of display ads, to whatever you wanted it to be. If brands wanted to connect, you couldn’t hire 100 influencers to suddenly be passionate about your juicer.

If a blogger wanted to grow, they better be passionate about what they are writing about.

And that’s all we could do, because content wasn’t a thing.

We just told stories.

We didn’t try to grow.

We wanted to join.

We didn’t try to pitch.

We wanted to be heard.

We didn’t try to track.

We wanted to be found.

We were content with that.

Declawing the content cat

I don’t think content marketing can be reeled back in. The cat is out of the bag, has tracked the bag, has put the bag in its cart, has abandoned the cart, has gotten 5 emails in a 6 email journey about the bag, has seen an influencer hawking the bag, and finally decided to get the damn bag. Did they actually want it? Behavioral economics would indicate no, probably not.

But what I can do — what any of us can do in this field — is remember why we like creating content in the first place. Why we want to create in the first place. And keep coming back to it. Because any of you reading this, especially this far in, like consuming content. Check that, like reading a story.

A story about how to improve. Or a story about someone else’s life. Or a story about a celebrity or an athlete or a hobby.

Some of those stories can be a tweet. Some need thousands of words.

But we’d all be better served if we tried to keep the humans at the center of what we’re creating. Humans who don’t want shock and awe for the sake of tricking a click. Humans who don’t want to be tracked to the threshold of their lives so we can convince them to buy these shoes.

Offer what you have to say honestly and candidly. Make it interesting by being vulnerable and unpretentious. If you have something amazing to offer, say it and trust the people at the other end to know what you mean. Write articles because it sparks an interest or scratches your curiosity, not because it’ll go viral; viral hasn’t once been etched on a tombstone that didn’t include “died from.” Leave comments on blogs. Call out shady marketers making us all look bad.

And yeah, you don’t have to stay off my lawn. Maybe the content is greener on the other side.