Content Marketing from 1700s to Now

Content is king, and it will always be.

If marketers had a dollar every time they’d be told “write good content!”, plenty of us would be millionaires by now! No matter how many updates and changes there will be in digital marketing and the search industry, relevant and original content is a staple.

Over the years, what determines “good” content has changed. Before Google’s Panda and Penguin updates in 2011 and 2012 perspectively, the web was proliferated with low-quality sites and spammy content.

But how did we reach this point? Who, where, and when started content marketing?

1700s: The Formula of Content + Promotion

If we consider the combination of content and promotion as to what is considered content marketing, then our story begins in the 1700s: when Benjamin Franklin published the first annual Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1732 to promote his printing business.

This was one of the earliest idea emergence of creating a copy to advertise a product or business. Even way before the internet came to be, marketers used customer experience, relevance and even storytelling for their content. While the end goal was to generate sales, the approach was not to sell to the people, but to talk them. It’s a useful tip for today.

1990s: The Birth of Computers

Towards the end of the 20th century, the introduction of computers changed the landscape of content marketing. In 1994, the first online blog was made, and four years after, Microsoft launched its first major corporate blog.

Sponsored content sprouted from the ground following the advent of the first blogs, but that’s all that they were then: sprouts. The goal of most content marketing back then was to get people to visit businesses’ real-world locations.

Content marketing and blogging weren’t anything big and popular back then, although that was bound to change in just less than a decade.

2000s: Getting More Digital

Personal blogging flourished in the 2000s; the birth of bloggers who would become influencers. There was at least one blog for any topic you could imagine at that era. Of course, since people had gone online, businesses followed suit.

E-commerce experienced significant growth at the turn of the century. It was this decade where marketers started understanding how content, relevance, keywords and ads can help them generate traffic and leads.

2010s: The Digital & Social Revolution

The immediacy of producing, sharing, and consuming content was even easier thanks to search engines and social networks by the 2010s. And so, content marketers grew in number and importance. Besides blogs, content was also in the forms of articles, eBooks, and white papers.

Marketers began optimising their websites and content for search engine- essentially the birth of SEO. Aiming to rig the system to their favour, marketers also utilised a lot of blackhat SEO techniques. Content quality went down the drain as keyword stuffing, invisible text, link manipulation, and bloated metadata became a common sight online.

But like mentioned at the beginning of this post, Google penalised these websites that used blackhat tactics. The search engine aimed to please the consumers because that’s where the value is. 

What is Content Marketing Now?

There’s a lot that’s changed but the key takeaway of what constitutes as good content marketing is that content should be written for your human audience- natural-sounding, human-like, and of course, relevant.

Make sure that your content marketing and SEO work seamlessly together. One cannot work well without the other; you need both. There are plenty of digital tools at your disposal to create rich, original content that users will love.