Content marketing has been the hype topic in marketing in recent years . Whether creatives, SEOs, online marketers, PR specialists, social media managers, media professionals, publishers or advertisers, everyone is now at the forefront of the big topic of content marketing. But how many cooks spoil the broth, or who should be in charge of cooking for which goals? I would like to give my answers to these questions and more in the following lines.
1 Content Marketing and the Many Cooks
2 The historical development of content marketing in Germany and the USA
2.1 Google's anti-spam activities as drivers of the content marketing hype
3 Content marketing in Germany follows tactical goals, in the USA the focus is on strategic goals
4 Who is primarily responsible for content marketing?
5 Conclusion: The responsibility for content marketing lies with marketing
Content Marketing and the Many Cooks
Over the past few years, I've had the opportunity to interact with many smart people and attend a number of events on the subject of content marketing. I've noticed time and again that depending on where the people or events have their roots, they tend to think in a certain direction. The following example is a good example.
Ulf Hendrik Schrader & Olaf Kopp at the CMCx 2016, photo by Thomas Leege
In 2016, I had the honor of speaking for the first time at the Content cameroon phone number data Marketing Conference in Munich . , you found a wide range of topics from a variety of areas. Here is an excerpt:
Among the speakers you will find experts from the areas of online marketing , media , data , strategic marketing , marketing , brand management and some positions that have already been created in the area of content marketing . My colleague Andre Alpar , I and perhaps my colleague Fionn Kientzler were the only speakers with an SEO background.
A side note: The organizer of the Content Marketing Conference, or CMCx for short, is Rene Kühn , who took his first steps in the publishing environment in content marketing.
A good two weeks later I was in Berlin for the Content Marketing Day as part of the Campixx Week in Berlin . This event is organized by Marco Janck , who has a background in SEO but has been thinking outside the box in recent years. In addition, speakers can submit their own session topics, just like at a Barcamp, and there are almost no hurdles to giving a talk. Here is an excerpt of the speakers and their positions.
Maybe it was just my choice of sessions, but what was striking was the relatively large proportion of speakers from the SEO sector.
In almost every session, I asked the speakers afterwards why the responsibility for content marketing was taken over by SEO agencies or the SEO in-house teams.
The answers ranged from " that's historically justified. We're an SEO agency " to slightly arrogant statements like " the others just can't do it ". In addition, many of the content marketing presentations at Campixx were primarily about generating backlinks . The success of " content marketing campaigns " was assessed by how many backlinks were generated, even though some of the content was also published offline in print formats at the same time. A bit paradoxical, isn't it?
Especially at the Campixx Content Marketing Day, the dilemma surrounding content marketing in Germany became apparent to me again, which I will discuss in more detail later in this article.
Sudhir Sharma, Director Acquisition Marketing
If you compare the German and American events, you will notice that in Germany a very broad range of areas are primarily responsible for the content marketing soup, while in the USA the speakers can be roughly classified into a few overarching areas.
creatives
marketing and brand managers
content marketers
It is also noticeable that American companies seem to be much more willing to create content marketing positions, such as content marketing managers or chief content officers. But where do these country-specific differences come from?
To explain this, I have taken a closer look at the historical development of content marketing over the last 10 years.
Below is an excursion into the most recent historical development of content marketing. A brief note in advance to anticipate objections: I do not want to get into the discussion here about the fact that content marketing has been around for decades/centuries in the form of corporate publishing etc., but rather just look at the term content marketing .
The historical development of content marketing in Germany and the USA
In my opinion, the different perspectives and, above all, allocation of responsibilities for the topic of content marketing in Germany compared to the USA can be traced back to the different historical developments.
In order to analyze the historical development of the topic or term content marketing, I looked a little more closely at the demand and reporting on the topic in both countries. I will also discuss the developments in Google search, which in my opinion had a decisive influence on the development of the "content marketing hype".
Google's anti-spam activities as drivers of the content marketing hype
Since February 2011, Google has launched an offensive to promote “good content” with the Panda update series. In Germany, the first Panda update was introduced in August 2011.
panda update
Source: Sistrix / https://www.sistrix.de/frag-sistrix/goo ... refreshes/
About a year later, in April 2012, Google rolled out the Penguin update series worldwide, which turned out to be Google's most drastic intervention in the issue of link spam to date.
Source: Sistrix / https://www.sistrix.de/google-updates/
Source: Sistrix / https://www.sistrix.de/google-updates/
Up to that point, a separate industry had developed around the topic of link trading based on link sales, also with the help of partially automated link networks, which generated considerable revenues. This was a thorn in Google's side in many ways.
The Panda update and the Penguin update series introduced in 2012 were Google's first serious measures to put a stop to the non-user-oriented manipulation of its own search results. Until then, the SEO industry had been happily scraping, spinning, aggregating, and flooding the web with more or less automated and therefore rather low-quality content. Up until then, most SEOs didn't care about users or user-oriented content that was so good that it generated backlinks, because it was easier to achieve good rankings.
The SEO industry only really became aware of the exact impact of the two update series on the rankings and, above all, on the previous working methods in the period from 2012 to 2014. Thus, the years 2012, 2013 and 2014, with the penalties imposed by various link networks worldwide, should go down in the SEO history books as the "years of rethinking".
At the same time, these years finally ended the golden years of SEO, at least for affiliate SEOs, and the associated gold rush atmosphere in the industry. More information about Google's anti-spam measures in general and in the past can be found here.
Twitter PR by Google's former head of the Search Quality team Matt Cutts in 2014 to penalize link networks in Germany
Twitter PR by Google's former head of the Search Quality team Matt Cutts in 2014 to penalize link networks in Germany
Google accompanied these updates and measures during this period with astonishing openness and willingly commented, sometimes unsolicited, on update versions and penalties from various link networks. Through this PR, Google ensured a professionalization of the SEO industry. SEOs had to deal with new, secure and reputable methods for generating backlinks and rankings.
In my opinion, the content marketing hype in Germany is closely linked to the Panda and especially the Penguin updates and Google's other anti-spam measures in 2012, 2013 and 2014.
A look at Google Trends underlines this assumption. In Germany, the topic of content marketing gained momentum at the end of 2012:
Germany
Source: Google Trends
The topic of content marketing has been a trending topic in the USA since the end of 2010, as Google Trends shows:
USA
Source: Google Trends
At the end of 2012, there was another disproportionate increase in demand for content marketing in both countries. Here, SEOs came up with the topic of content marketing and gave demand an additional boost.
[tweetthis twitter_handles=“@Olaf_Kopp“ url =“http://bit.ly/1oteB78″]SEOs have instrumentalized content marketing to get backlinks without being penalized.[/tweetthis]
Originally, the topic was discovered and introduced by other industries. I researched who in Germany was responsible for the first editorial contributions on the topic of content marketing.
In Germany, I came across the first document on the topic of content marketing in 2009. Firstly, a call for a diploma thesis from the Fraunhofer Institute on the topic of "Using social media and content marketing to communicate consulting services" and a term paper entitled Journalistic quality of content marketing portals: A qualitative content analysis of selected online portals . This paper was written by a student on a PR course.
An interview with Rene Kühn , who is also the organizer of the Content Marketing Conference, was, together with the study paper, the only notable German publications in 2009. In 2010, the number of publications remained manageable. For example, here , here or here . All articles here also come from the PR environment.
In 2011, significantly more publications appeared in the PR, marketing and now also in the online marketing context. Up until then, content marketing had not been an issue in the SEO area. At the end of 2011, I came across the first content marketing article in the SEO context with the title Linkbuilding 3.0 - External link building, effective content marketing, backlink automation .
Over the course of 2012, there was a growing number of articles on the topic of content marketing, some with ridiculous titles such as "Classic SEO is out - content marketing is in" or "Content marketing instead of SEO", which were not published by the SEO industry itself, but were intended to provide a template for articles on the topic from the SEO scene. Content marketing was touted as an alternative to SEO. Other industries obviously wanted to grab SEO budgets.
Since 2013, the topic of content marketing has been an integral part of every SEO conference. This is logical, as the classic link building via spam or link purchasing has become increasingly ineffective and dangerous.
In the USA, however, the topic initially developed independently of SEO and the content marketing trend grew for years in the communications and PR environment regardless of SEO interests.
For me, this is the reason why the USA, in my opinion, is already one step ahead here, as I am of the firm opinion that content marketing is not a search engine optimization measure or that it leads to a dead end, as I described in detail in the article Content Marketing is not Link Building and SEO .