Content Marketing: Then and Now

Once upon a time, there was a man in a cave, carving signs on a wall, and sending signals to the neighbouring cave, through fire or primitive chants. Believe it or not, those were the first signs of content marketing for the purpose of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent information to initiate audience action, or in this case, getting a proper wife, defining a territory, or hunting for dinner.

1895-1930s

A lot of marketers cite the 1895 launch of John Deere’s The Furrow as the first example of content marketing, making the strategy 121 years old this year. Deere’s purpose was to educate farmers on new technology and how they could be more successful business owners and farmers hence, content marketing. The book was developed by journalists, creative storytellers, and talented designers to covered topics that farmers were interested in. The goal of the content was to help farmers become more profitable.

During that time, the main tools were newspapers, magazines, and direct sales. The magazines were nicely designed, with high-quality publications full of information that their readers actually found useful depending on their field.

1930s-1985

Advertising began to emerge as an engine affecting consumer behavior, and the previous examples of historical content marketing faded into the background. To be fair, advertising kinda killed content. Why?

As the 1950s became the 60s and 70s, ads had manipulative traits: discrimination, racism and sexism. But then came the 90’s with the birth of the Internet and content marketing was stronger than ever. Microsoft launched the first major corporate blog in 1998 and the same year the phrase “content marketing” was introduced.

2000’s 

There are more content marketers than ever.  More content is being produced to reach even more difficult niche markets are rising that we need to reach. Content tools like blogs, e-mails, how-to guides, infographics, case studies, testimonials, e-newsletters, e-books worked beautifully and are considered as one of the most powerful tools yet. Did we forget something though…?

Videos

The peak of content marketing is undoubtedly videos. We previously saw how videos are the future of content marketing. Videos are a vast type of content, and with platforms such as YouTube, user-generated content has been highly encouraged. However, not every video can live up to your expectations, except wezank videos of course.

After going through the past, present and future of content marketing. It is important to recognize the impact videos have on the market. Lights! Camera! Conversion!