Your Content Game Plan: Content Strategy, Content Marketing, Content Management

You can't get more than a sentence or two into a post or article on marketing without colliding into one of these terms: Content Strategy, Content Marketing, Content Management. Within a paragraph or so, you'll likely encounter them all. Those of us in the content creation world are familiar with all three, but that might not be the case for everyone. So today I thought I'd go to the experts and provide some basic definitions of these three critical concepts that make up your overall Content Game Plan.

Content Strategy

Michael Brenner (@brennermichael), Senior Director of #Marketing and Content Strategy for SAP defines it as "the mindset, culture and approach to delivering your customers' information needs in all places they are searching for it, across each stage of the buying process."

Mark O'Brien (@newfangledmark), CEO of Newfangled Web Developers, defines it as "a plan for regularly adding unique, expert, and indexable content to your site."

Kristina Halvorson (@halvorson), Content Strategist, Founder and President of Brain Traffic  says that "Content Strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content. " She says the Content Strategist must define why we're publishing it in the first place.

In a word: Content Strategy is the why of content.

Content Marketing

Joe Pulizzi (@juntajoe), Founder of the Content Marketing Institute says that the formal definition of Content Marketing is "creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action."

Robert Rose (@robert_rose), Strategist @CMI/Analyst at Digital Clarity Group says that "traditional marketing and adverting is telling the world you're a rockstar. Content Marketing is showing the world that you are one."

Jason Falls (@jasonfalls), founder of Social Media Explorer defines it as "using any type of content (newsletters, blog posts, white papers, video, tweets, podcasts, wall posts) to attract an audience you wish to market to."

In a word: Content Marketing is the what of content.

Content Management

Kevin P. Nichols (@kpnichols), Director and Practice Lead for Content Strategy, Sapient Nitro, says it "designs the processes and structures as well as implements technologies to manage content from acquisition and publication to storage."

Laurence Hart (@piewords), Information Professional, CIO for AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) calls it "the coordinated management of all content throughout an organization, allowing for people and systems to find and use content from within any business context."

Bernard Kohan, Co-Founder and Chief Business Development Officer at Comentum Corporation defines it as "an application that provides capabilities for multiple users with different permission levels to manage content, data, or information of a website project or internet/intranet application."

In a word, Content Management is the how of content.

There you have it. The Why, What and How of Content.

How does your Content Game Plan shape up? Is it a winner?

Content is Still King: 5 SEO Experts Speak

In 1992, James Carville, a key advisor to presidential candidate Bill Clinton, came up with a memorable slogan for the campaign: It’s the economy, stupid. As the battle rages over how best to incorporate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) into website copywriting, more and more SEO experts are returning to a basic idea that can be similarly summed up: It’s the content, stupid.

The “stupid,” is probably harsh, but there is no doubt that the SEO discussion is shifting from a focus on “technology” to an emphasis on “content.”

Here is what five SEO experts have to say on the subject.

Paul Boag (@boagworld) co-founder of Headscape from his Smashing Magazine article,  “The Inconvenient Truth about SEO.”

- “We shouldn’t be optimizing for search engines at all. We should be optimizing content for people.”

- “Your primary objective should be better content, not higher rankings.”

- “In short, write useful content.”

He suggests you do this through white papers, blogs, research findings, case studies, user generated content and interviews among other things.

Gisele Navarro Mendez (@giselenmendez), Upstream Connections’ Social Community Manager in her In Social We Trust post  “The SEO Way of Thinking Needs to Go.”

- “Instead of building links, try building relationships.”

- “People don’t care about SERPs or the way Google works. They will click on the links they want, but if you have failed at delivering good content /products /services /support, they will leave your site and never look back.”

- “People will find your site if there’s a network of happy customers supporting your business.”

Jonathan Gebauer (@jobebauer), founder Explore B2B in B2B’s article, “Debunking SEO: Jonathan Gebauer.”

- “Good SEO is natural SEO.”

- “Provide strong, engaging content that people are interested to read.”

- “Focus on being an entertaining and reliable content provider.”

Lisa Barone (@LisaBarone), VP of Strategy at Overit in B2B’s article  “Debunking SEO: Lisa Barone”

- “Shift away from creating ‘unique content’ to ‘purposeful content.”

- “Content has always had the crown, but now it’s got the respect to go with it.”

- “Focus on the right party – customers, not the search engines.”

Melissa Fach (@SEOAware), CEO of SEO Aware and Managing Editor of Search Engine Journal in B2B’s article “Debunking SEO: Melissa Fach.”

“You cannot be successful without content and SEO combined. I know there are those that get a site at the top of page one with crappy content, but they have nothing in place for conversion and/or maintaining a solid audience. So even if you get to #1, without the right content, you fail anyway.”

What do you think? Technology or Content? How best to reach your prospect base?