“Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, Acquire, and engage a Clearly Defined and Understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action. “- This definition can be found at CMI and is widely used.

“Content marketing is the art of understanding exactly what your customers need to know and delivering it to them in a relevant and compelling way .” – State in one of the first books about Content Marketing:

• Pulizzi & Barrett (2009) Get content, get customers . McGraw Hill

Content marketing becomes more and more important for marketing-communication and branding, at the expense of advertising.

Similarities between content marketing and free publicity

Content marketing and free publicity are strongly related, similarities are:

• content / message and media are the core, therefore the knowledge and skills of communication experts are useful
• contributes to the brand-image (so they both are branding tools)
• focusing on awareness, not primarily on sales or conversion. (So KPIs should be formulated on the branding level.)

Difference is mainly that content marketing focuses on online and free publicity on offline. But free publicity often consists for a large part of online marketing, and online content usually is related to events in the offline world. (So, both content marketing and free publicity are cross-medial).