Yikes! It Looks Like Google May Be the King of Content Marketing, Too!
We all know that Google is the dominant search engine. Their Gmail is a powerhouse, too. More recently, they’re making a big splash with Google Apps as they begin to go toe to toe with Microsoft.
As Joe Pulizzi points out in a recent post, even some smart observers fail to understand that content marketing is at the core of their business.
Joe references a letter to the editor in the March 2008 issue of Fast Company. The writer doubts that Google should remain a business icon:
“Maybe it’s time to get off the Google bandwagon. It’s all expansion of one good idea, some smart acquisitions, and lots and lots of cool, free, unprofitable stuff that allows the old idea to make more money.“
Joe rightly counters that the genius of Google is the very fact that it does offer “lots of cool, free, unprofitable stuff.” All this stuff is their version of a content marketing strategy which strengthens our collective relationship with the Google brand.
Give away great stuff for free!
Of course, the rest of us can’t deliver the plethora of free products and services that Google has on offer.
According to Joe, what we can offer as our own content marketing strategies is:
Not Apps and Gmail, but White Papers, Blogs and Articles
Let’s go back to our letter to the editor. Google creates “lots of cool, free, unprofitable stuff” that generates revenues through other products. That’s the essence of content marketing.
When you deliver ultra-valuable information to your customers, and not just product pitches, it drives customers to your “paid” products.
Free doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. Actually, your free content that you deliver must be the best stuff around, or why would they consider buying what you actually have to offer?
Speaking of lots of great free stuff
Be sure to check out the rest of Joe’s article here as well as the invaluable content about content marketing he make available on his blog and website.
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Hi - thanks for this post. What’s interesting is that very little, if anything at all, at Google is their own content.. unless you count applications. The content they are marketing (sometimes for a fee) — paid ads and search returns — are other people’s stuff. Seems their strategy is to become the web’s content management system, and provide “cool tools” (like gmail) you like to use which also contain their fee based ads (the real “content”) which are in turn pointing back to our own content at our websites. And, many have learned you can pay for ads on Google to market your content, but if you don’t convert visitors to customers, your content does is not paying off. Google serves it up alongside popular, useful applications — but it is up to us to deliver.
- Scott