Birth of Smart Content Marketing

Are you a ceo, cmo, vp of sales, or marcom manager?

If so, PLEASE read this!

While there’s no such thing as the “perfect answer” for how to attract new clients or customers, Content Marketing is certainly something worth trying these days.

When I first started getting seriously involved with Content Marketing back in 2008, I honestly didn’t know much about it.

That’s not too surprising - it was fairly new at the time.

Well, at least the name “Content Marketing” was new; the concepts behind it had been around since the early 1900s.

But I met a fellow in the Washington, D.C. area who hired me to join his Amplifier Content Marketing team because I’d already had many years of experience in what we traditionally just considered to be “marketing.”

My title was Vice President of Business Development and my job was to pitch business to all types of large corporations ranging from Canon to Sony to Melitta Coffee. The business I was pitching was music-based content; the owner of our firm had a background as a music magazine publisher and had somehow been exposed to this thing called “Content Marketing.”

He decided that we could market our existing music assets (articles, interviews, photos, videos) to companies that might want to leverage that content to attract more customers. Customers who loved music.

Long story short, our business closed after just a few months. It was the time when the stock market crashed (fall of 2008) and most of our prospects had a hard time getting their minds around the idea of becoming a “music content publisher” of sorts. Content Marketing was just too much of a radical concept, I guess.

Fast forward a couple of years and I decided to start offering my services as a copywriter for hire. One thing led to another, and I soon added video production to those services. (I’m a former NBC television news anchor and executive producer.)

And then one day, I mentioned Content Marketing to someone and they’d actually heard of it! Enough time had passed that now some businesses were catching onto the idea of using content to “tell their stories” and get their own prospects, clients, customers, and members interested in what they had to say.

It was suddenly favorable to talk about Content Marketing!

This was in 2010 and it was the birth of what has become one of the greatest loves of my life - Smart Content Marketing, LLC in Washington, D.C.

I hope you’ll follow our stories in the coming weeks…months…years. Maybe they’ll help you in some small way. Thanks in advance!