Hi, Alex Butzbach here with this week’s edition of content and coffee. Coming up with an effective content marketing campaign means properly visualizing what you want to offer customers. With that perspective in mind, we’ll see that content marketing has been around a lot longer than you might think. Click play on the video or keep reading below.
When I was growing up, my mom did something that I bet you’ve also witnessed – she clipped recipes. She had a book full of them, and my best guess is that they were accumulated over the course of at least 30 years. But where did they come from? Some were from newspapers and magazines, but at least half looked like they came from packages of food – much like the earliest examples content marketing.
This started back in 1891, as far as we can tell. Dr. August Oetker was a pharmacist in Germany trying to sell bicarbonate, or baking powder. His master stroke was to start giving out recipe cards, and he even began selling baking soda with recipes printed right on the packaging. Dr. Oetker’s company is still going strong over a century later, and we can attribute at least some of that to his savvy marketing techniques.
We might have much fancier content delivery systems these days, but Dr. Oetker’s model is a great way to understand what you’re trying to give your customers. Sure, you might want them to buy your baking soda – or IT consulting services, or legal advice, or beauty products – but what makes you any different from other merchants?
It’s not like people weighed the value of two or three types of baking soda and thought “Well, at least I’m getting a recipe out of this. I’ll go with Dr. Oetker.” No, they just realized when they patronized Dr. Oetker that they were also getting useful information – something they would use down the road. And over the course of months, years and many tins of baking powder, they came to a realization: This guy knows his stuff!
By the same token, you want to show customers that you know your stuff. One single articles isn’t going to blow their minds, but after careful consideration – and when perhaps they’ve sampled what competitors have to offer – it will dawn on them that you know as much about your business as Dr. Oetker did about baking. And then it’ll be no contest.
Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next week.
