The term Content Marketing needs to be killed dead and buried deep. You already know this, but you haven’t acted because you’re a coward. Your plate is full; you don’t have time to take stands. How long did you think you could ignore it? You. Yeah, you. Content Marketer. You’re personally responsible for a heap of confusion and total annihilation of your profession’s name is the only way out.
Look in the mirror. Who even are you? Recruiters and your fellow marketers don’t know. Nobody does. That’s because you’re a hot mess of skills, a steaming pile of possibility. You’re a savvy copywriter, editor, and brand strategist. You’re a maestro of communication systems and interpreter of dashboards. You build community and craft experience for tens of thousands every day. But does anyone—anywhere—understand what you do until you explain it? Can you do it in a sentence?
You’ve reported into Comms, Growth, Brand, Product, and managed your own independent Content team. You’ve chased every outcome known to marketing. Your scope of influence ranges by company. You work with HR to inspire employer-brand; you partner with Growth to generate leads and develop lifecycles; Brand and Customer Service seek you out to help build and manage communities; Comms calls upon you to help craft thought leadership. You play well with Legal and Product likes the way you flow. You’re not on the Creative team, but you produce and share beautiful creative daily. You crunch numbers, present dashboards, and hire freelancers to support your wild ideas when they get too big to tackle in-house. Sounds like you cover a lot of ground, Content Marketer. But where do you go?
You’re hard to pin to any one team. Disruptive, you ruffle feathers carving out a space to call your own. You’ve existed in marketing purgatories where you report to everyone and no-one. You’re a marketer and media producer, an editor and analyst. You sound like an entire agency. (You’re not.) You’re probably a reformed journalist or creative-writer-turned-marketer type. Or maybe you’re an analytics focused SEO-junkie who once dreamed of being a storyteller. You might be transitioning from a job in PR. You’ve likely proselytized that brands are the future of media and have an opinion about building systems vs campaigns. Whatever your type, you’ve chosen to throw specialization to the wind and float under the meaningless umbrella term Content Marketing.
Your Content Marketing resume feels like a delusion of grandeur: You write and edit feature-length blog posts and do video and gif production. You build sweeping cross-channel strategies, copyedit, and tell stories in 140 characters. You design wireframes and breathe life into SEO landing pages; you write video scripts and develop editorial guidelines for all the contributors you manage. You're the architect of publishing systems and builder of nimble teams. Your ideas incorporate every form of digital media. They deliver measurable results from product to promotions. You're fluent in A/B testing. You revel in conversations about dark social and the future of communication, and you excel at editorial calendaring. You can—and often have—done it all. But what of it all do you do well?
Cowardly Content Marketer! You weak, unique flower. Gather your colleagues and celebrate individuality. Identify what type of content marketer you are and find a way to communicate it on your resume and portfolio. Show empathy for hiring managers sifting through thousands of seemingly identical but colossally different Content Marketers all operating under the same vague banner. Content Marketing is a catch-all that's being used so liberally to describe new roles in the increasingly editorial marketing environment that the term has nearly lost all meaning. Which brings us back to the point: This is all your fault.
You’re scared. It’s okay. Nobody said killing Content Marketing is going to be easy. The term legitimizes your linkedin profile. The HR bots crawling your resume break into a jig every time they catch its scent. It’s trending. Also, you kinda like it. Content Marketing! The vagueness ignites your entrepreneurial spirit: You’ll create media empires! Build small but mighty guerilla-marketing teams! Maybe you’ll just code and load posts into a CMS. No two jobs will ever be the same! Spirit isn’t enough. You need to tell the world who you are. Take these scissors and kill. Kill, before you wash out completely.
Content Marketing is a meaningless term. PR is content. Product is content. Blogs and social are content. Emails are content. Direct mail is content. Unless you’re the head of Marketing, you probably don’t manage all of it. Evolve. Kill. Rally your colleagues to stop saying Content Marketing. Strike it from your everything. There will be no sobbing at its funeral, only the silence of shame and regret that it was allowed to live for so long.
It’s all up to you, Content Marketer—cowardly, capable you. You celebrate and clarify for a living. Isn’t it about time you rolled out some better terms for this confounding disruption you call a career? I’d do it myself, but I’m looking for a job in Content Marketing.