I am going to ask you a rather odd question, given that you have opened up my Nailing Post blog and are reading it: Is content marketing dead? Has the posting of not only blogs, but videos and podcasts reached their zenith and are in the process of falling back to earth as a marketing tool? Has the allure of search-engine marketing combined with AI, where digital listening ears take us directly to the products we have talked about, taken the place of posted content? Here is my answer: no, and here is my reasoning.

I have been writing the Nailing Post marketing blog once a week for nearly 15 years. Here is what I have learned about the power of content marketing. First, it is a tool that does two things for me: it connects me to people who I have not previously met and it lends credibility to my brand. Second, people still follow it if it is well done. There’s the catch – just like anything else you do in marketing, it has to be something valuable and produced at a level worthy of my time.

Let me delve into the first benefit – it connects my brand to people. Any good bit of marketing will connect you with people. You can pick your medium and they all will engage people with your brand. The question is, are they the right people? I was meeting with a client recently and we were going through some website analytics. He was quite proud of the number of people accessing his website. As we looked a little deeper at who those people were, he found that most of them were not located where he was selling his services. In fact, a good portion of them were not even in the same country as he was and all of his sales were within a 100-mile radius of his physical location. The value of content marketing is that it connects you with the right people, not those who will never consider doing business with you. It weeds out those who have no interest in you. How am I so confident that content marketing finds the right people? Simply stated, we have choices that influence our decisions. Because there are a lot of choices in what we look at, people simply will not waste their time reading a post, watching a video or listening to audio files when they have no interest in them. That means the people who do take the time to read, watch or listen are the people you should be targeting.

The second benefit of content marketing is it lends credibility to your brand. There is nothing like showing your target market what you can do. It is one of the most powerful pieces of marketing you will ever do. It tells them you know what you are doing and are not some fly-by-night operation that will be shut down the next time they need you. Content marketing builds trust in your brand. That is key to keeping customers happy and returning for more sales – what we call retention marketing.

Is content marketing dead? No, it is still a very viable way to gain the faith of customers and keep them coming back to you again and again. You are proof it works, because you read this blog all the way to the end.