Note: This post is by Dennis Shiao and was originally published in the “Content Corner” email newsletter. Read past issues (and subscribe!).
In a Content Marketing Institute (CMI) post titled “Are Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing Still Different in 2021?” Robert Rose shared a definition for content marketing.
Note: Read Robert’s post because it’s quite good – I’m going to focus on a small element of the post.
CMI’s @Robert_Rose was recently asked a question he hadn’t heard in a while. Unsure if his answer from 10 years ago was still valid, he did some digging. Here’s what he realized. https://t.co/tzwZNroXFY
— Content Marketing Institute (@CMIContent) November 3, 2021
Here is CMI’s long-held definition of content marketing:
“A strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
I’ve seen this definition before and agreed with it.
Reading it recently, though, my eyes fixated on one word: profitable.
Must all content marketing have the objective of driving profitable customer action? “Profit” is a financial term. It’s what’s left over after you subtract costs from sales. It’s a dollar amount that can also be expressed as a percentage.
For most businesses, marketing that doesn’t generate a profit is marketing that gets cut by the CEO or CFO. So generating a profit is a valid and necessary goal.
But what about non-profit organizations?
They need income to sustain, but their charter, by definition, is NOT to generate a profit. Can non-profit organizations practice content marketing?
I think they can.
Let’s consider two scenarios that are not profit-oriented.
1) An organization that seeks to change the world 🌏
Fight climate change. End world hunger. Eliminate certain infectious diseases. If your mission is to change the world, then that’s what you focus on. Profit is good, but really, changing the world is what you’re after.
2) A business entering a new market
Amazon’s retail business was highly unprofitable (i.e., by design) 📉 for many years. I don’t know that Amazon did much in the way of content marketing, but if they did, it wasn’t to generate profitable customer action.
It would have been to drive awareness, brand consideration and plain old sales (profits be damned). So maybe profit isn’t the be-all end-all.
Proposing an updated definition for content marketing
Could this tweak work better:
“A strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving meaningful action.”
“Meaningful action” could describe an organization’s desire to change the world. I acknowledge, though, that the definition just got a lot more broad. “Profit” is easy to understand. “Meaningful” is so broad that it could be meaningless.
Paul Robinson commented on Twitter:
Including the word “profitable” is limiting & confusing. It creates the KPIs that run counter to the holistic strategic objectives to add value to (not derive value from) your audience. Yes profit is the goal of the business but It’s not a revenue lever like performance tactics.
— Paul P. Robinson (@pprobinson) December 27, 2021