Last week, John Lane from Centerline Digital wrote an informative piece entitled “Think People Hate Marketing? Try the Right Content in the Right Place“. In short, I agree with his observations that people’s negative reaction to marketing/advertising tends to be the result of an unwelcomed disruption of the marketing material. He identifies two types of dissonance:
- Marketing in the wrong place: It’s the right message, but it interrupts the wrong audience.
- Marketing with the wrong message: It reaches the “right” audience, but the message itself doesn’t resonate, for various reasons.
The solution, of course, is to (a) identify the right audience, and (b) develop marketing materials (content marketing) that is right for that audience, something that the audience may find useful. The author goes on to discuss finding content in customer service channels. While he doesn’t call attention to it by name, I think one of those channels has to be product training, which gets back to my ‘thing’ that I call up time and time again. Product training and customer support are treasure troves of content marketing source materials.