The Agile Marketer

Appendix 1

Content Marketing: An Agile Approach

Content marketing is a practice focused on communicating messages that influence buying behavior and other business goals. Unlike traditional advertising, content marketing tends to focus on establishing a relationship with a prospect or customer over time through the delivery of value-rich content. In this way, content marketing is fundamentally about nurturing a relationship to impact progression through the customer life cycle. It is a softer approach when it comes to selling and attempts to avoid messages that come across as sales pitches. Instead, it aims to educate and entertain potential customers as a means of establishing trust. For existing customers, it aims to support adoption, customer success, and promote loyalty.

Across the customer life cycle content marketing supports a broad range of business goals. Think about it: Almost every touchpoint that a customer interacts with involves some form of content, whether digital or traditional in format. Content marketing serves a range of specific business goals. It organizes and sequences different types of content to systematically drive prospects down the sales and marketing funnel (the buy-side of the customer life cycle in the diagram presented in the Conclusion), as well as down an advocacy funnel (the own-side).

One of the most common challenges that marketers face today is how to manage all of this content, which in recent years has been proliferating. As we noted ...