James Tuckerman, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Anthill Online, foresaw the trending growth in the adoption of content marketing. Content marketing has become one of the cheapest, most cost-effective ways of raising awareness of who you are and what you do, because it only really requires the creation of content. Great content becomes sharable and also becomes findable.
What’s more—consumers no longer care about channels. Say your iPhone breaks and there is an error message popping up, and you want to know how to fix it. You no longer go to the official iPhone website—instead, you type the error message into Google and the most relevant item will come up first.
Similarly, if you want to research a particular car, you don’t necessarily go to the manufacturer’s website. Rather, you peruse the web for bloggers or reviewers with independent thoughts on the model. Many of these official websites are losing traffic to the social web and blogosphere. Indeed, even our news sources are no longer an issue of loyalty. If you provide better coverage and analysis of your state election than a national news website, the masses will find and flock to you instead. Wherever it comes from and whomever we get it from, fantastic content is irresistible. This has been a gift for content marketers.
James gives the example of a solar panel business that was spending half a million dollars every year on advertising. Finally they said, “Stuff this! Let’s just become Australia’s leading source of cleantech news.”
They hired three journalists, started a website that cost far less than half a million, and suddenly they were the best cleantech news resource in Australia. 
The ABC and The Australian newspaper do not have a fulltime cleantech writer, yet this website had three, and now it generates 15 times more leads than it ever did through traditional advertising.
This is the power of content marketing.
Business owners are increasingly generating content to share for marketing purposes. Company websites with a blog get 12 times as much traffic as an equivalent website within that particular industry, James says, indicating that content marketing is the perfect way to make your small business findable by your target audience, and sharable. This article is based on an extract from the Innovation Through Technology webinar, which was presented by James Tuckerman and Rebekah Campbell. Click here to access the Innovation Through Technology webinar recording from the On-Demand Learning Centre. This article was co-authored by Elizabeth Rowe. Elizabeth graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (English Literature) at the ANU and a Masters of Media Practice at the University of Sydney. She is currently completing an internship with the Australian Businesswomen’s Network.
