Upon reading Gary Vaynerchuk’s book “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook” (2013), I was overwhelmed with the amount of useful information he gave us. However, I also questioned how relevant the information he provided us with still is. Furthermore, I questioned how creative, artistic, or entrepreneurial people deal with content and context differently than marketers. Yes, I know that marketers will say that they are artistic and entrepreneurial, and in a sense most of us are marketers too, right? We are constantly marketing in ourselves. We market ourselves through our resumes, in our careers, in class, and in our social media platforms. Anyway, my curiosity was piqued by questions I asked myself aloud. “How do musicians view content and context? What about film directors or educators? Would they agree with Vaynerchuk’s statements? Is “content King and context God” (Vaynerchuk, 2013, p. 17) to everyone? Has content gotten better or have we gotten dumber? Or vice versa?” I set about attempting to find out (see TEDx video links below), how content marketing factors into marketing strategy for people in either creative or educational fields.
I find that most of us still carry the marketing campaign mentality. Our ultimate goal is to create a marketing campaign that is powerful and compelling. We are all currently attempting this task in our final projects, correct? In Vaynerchuk’s (2013) book he depicts and explains different brand campaigns used on different platforms, but have content marketing campaigns proven to be more effective in the years since he published his book? Agencies, I would imagine, all have different ideas of what works best, so is context more important? As far as I could find…YES. In this day and age of digital technology, professional marketers, musicians, film directors, etc., etc., must be aware of the platforms and apps consumers are using and what time(s) they are using them, but avoid presenting a carbon copy of the content across all communication avenues. No easy task for the independent types! By getting and developing context instead of establishing content little by little, we can manage to make content marketing campaigns fit into the consumer’s life, thus making it authentic and relatable to them. So your audience isn’t looking for content, they’re looking for you to tell their story.
I admit that I was hoping to find information that was contradictory to what Vaynerchuk offers, if only because I like meshing different perspectives together, but alas, the majority were in agreement.
If you work in the in the film or music industry, I highly recommend you watch this:
Cindy Noriega-Ortiz
References:
Vaynerchuk, G. (2013). Jab, jab, jab, right hook: How to tell your story in a noisy, social world. Harper Collins Publishers.