Verne Harnish, author of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, has a new article about the five most important business books of 2013:  5 must-read business books:  The past year has yielded a trove of insightful business books. These are the most important.

(I’m a big fan of Verne’s work, but he left off a few I would include.  I’ll get to my list in December).

I have presented two of his five at the First Friday Book Synopsis (Give and Take, and Antifragile), and keep waffling back and forth on Big Data.  No doubt about its value — I just can’t quite decide if it’s what our group at our event needs.  Thus, three of his five, I have not carefully read.  So…  I downloaded some sample pages, and started reading.

# 2 on Verne’s list is Epic Content Marketing:  How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less by Joe Pulizzi.  “Content Marketing” is a phrase that we’ve all heard.  This book will help you understand just what it means, and more importantly, what to do about it – how to put it to work.

Here it is in a nutshell –

Don’t sell; partner — by providing valuable content.
As a partner, provide content to your customers, and potential customers, that is valuable, to the customer, in and of itself.  Provide it for free.  Make it easy to access — to help keep your content top of mind.  And then, keep updating your content.

As an outcome, there is a decent chance that your customer will buy your services or products.  Because, you have already genuinely helped them – as their partner.

In the book, Mr. Pulizzi writes:

The only way to reach your audience in today’s information-drenched, content-saturated world is through Epic Content marketing that emotionally connects with the people you are trying to reach.
Your customers don’t care about you, your products, or your services.  They care about themselves…
Good content marketing makes a person stop, read, think, and behave differently.
In the context of this book, content is compelling content that informs, engages, or amuses. (But) it must do something for the business.  It must inform, engage, or amuse with the objective of driving customer action…  If it’s not accomplishing your busienss goals (for example, customer retention or lead generation), it’s not content marketing.

And I found this slide deck from the author, 20 Epic Examples of Content Marketing, including this slide:

 

I think his premise is right.    Partner, don’t sell.  Partner by providing an on-going stream of valuable content to your customer(s).

But, do so “with the objective of driving customer action…”  I think that’s a part of this that I need to more fully understand, and master.

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Here’s a quick way to get some of the key content of Give and Take, and Antifragile.  You can purchase my synopses of these books, and many others (like Steve Jobs; David and Goliath; Lean In), with multi-page, comprehensive handouts, plus the audio of my presentations, from our companion site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com.