What’s in a name? We chose to call ourselves an Online Marketing Agency… learn why in this article.
Content Marketing… or… Online Marketing? Short answer: Yes. Both apply. Right now, we’re going with Online Marketing, as in, Webdirexion is an Online Marketing Agency. Sure, the discipline of Content Marketing has become quite the rage in recent years, helped along by the realization that content can make connections that lead to customers. This is central to the work we perform at Webdirexion… so why not call ourselves a “Content Marketing Agency?” Short Answer: Content Marketing doesn’t define all that we do.
We recently redesigned our site, and are updating our brand, so that question came up a few times. To answer the central brand question — who are we? — we benchmarked competitors and saw they called themselves a range of things — from Digital Marketers to Internet Marketers to Integrated Marketers to Interactive Marketers. This name anxiety is another sign of how times have changed (no more Mad Men type “Ad Agencies” out there). In the end, we reviewed our core specialties and found we do things outside the bounds of “Content Marketing”. I’ll explain.
So here’s why we decided to call ourselves an Online Marketing Agency (with custom WordPress development and support services too)…
The Big Marketing Picture: Content Marketing does not encompass all of Marketing strategic and tactical thinking. I’m talking about old school four “P’s” which are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Content Marketing is a heavyweight fighter on the last P — Promotion — but it has little to say about pricing strategies, and nothing to say about your product or services themselves. Arguably, pricing and product are central to how your unique value proposition will be perceived.
Our Webdirexion SEO Formula is: Inbound Marketing + Media Placement + Social Media + Content Strategy = Strong SEO Results. Most of this work may be called “Content Marketing”, though there have been some classic arguments about the boundaries between inbound and content marketing. Now I love Joe Pulizzi, the GodFather of Content Marketing. He’s been a client, friend and colleague through the years (we build several of his sites), but I don’t think that “Content Marketing” is the final umbrella term here.
The Complete Webdirexion Online Marketing Cycle:
Above is the Online Marketing Cycle as practiced by Webdirexion. Purple items at right are traditionally taught as “Content Marketing”.
That’s what we do. Does the diagram above look like a cycle for both Sales and Marketing? Yes, and that’s the point. While Content Marketers focus on ways to create Content that compels engagement through the “power of story”, that seems to be as far as they take it. We want to help you bust right through to an effective follow-up process with your site visitors.
Note carefully that in both of our working formulas — the special sauce we use at Webdirexion — the term “Content Marketing” does not come up, though we have several components of it in our tactical mix. Don’t get me wrong — I’m a big fan of Pulizzi’s Content Marketing World Conferences (If you haven’t gone — you should). But there are other quality conferences out there that focus on different aspects of the business. Do we do Content Marketing here? Of course. Is it all we do? No.
I’ll sum it up with this question: of all the “C” words in Marketing — Community, Content, Conversation, Connection, Conversion — which is most important to a business seeking sales? Side note — in case you wonder where I got the C’s of Marketing, I’ve been writing about this since 2007.
If you guessed “Content”, thinking “Content is King”… guess again. At best, Content is an attractive Queen. Just firing links to content out there and robo posting same in social media is not the answer. That would be like having nothing but brochures and flyers — content — in a trade show booth. In the end it is real, authentic Connection that seals the deal. Content can get you there as it tells your story — people like to buy from those they feel they know. But the final sale happens between people — not content. I’ll be posting some more tips, tactics, traps and techniques as we go.
What say you? Write to me in comments here or drop us a line at hello [at] Webdirexion.com.
