On the way home from Content Marketing World last week I had a 12-hour layover in the Dallas airport. I also had a copy of Joe Pulizzi’s new book, Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break Through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less. Having just attended the mother of all content marketing conferences, I was certain I’d heard all the advice and wisdom one person could digest but I had 12 hours to kill so thought I’d crack the book. I was glad I did.
My desk is littered with marketing books, few of which I’ve read cover to cover. Like most of us, I never have enough time to keep up with all the reading. I’m a master skimmer though and view these books as my reference library. I read Pulizzi’s latest book from start to finish, partly because I had the luxury of uninterrupted time but mostly because it’s fantastic content. I consider Epic Content Marketing to be the essential guidebook for anyone interested in Content Marketing, from novice through to seasoned professional.
How to be epic
If you’re a regular reader of Joe Pulizzi’s blog posts, you’ll be familiar with his frank advice and easy writing style. (If you’re not a regular reader, you should be.) He’s included numerous case studies, interviews and expert opinion to support his view that content marketers need to be more strategic, focus on quality and take more risks to achieve epic content. While it sounds like an impossible goal, under Pulizzi’s careful guidance and encouragement, it doesn’t seem that way at all.
What I like most about Epic Content Marketing is it proves the burgeoning content marketing discipline is maturing. While many books focus on one area like strategy or content creation, this is a soup-to-nuts guide on how to manage the whole process. Starting with the history of content marketing, it addresses the whole gamut:
- How to find your niche
- Developing a strategy
- Managing the process of content marketing
- Marketing your stories
- Measuring the success (or failure) of your efforts
Get out of your comfort zone
Like all good marketers, Pulizzi has a strong call to action in this book. He asks us to get comfortable with failure, embrace risk and try to be truly epic with our content. Pulizzi explains we honour our readers when we create fantastic content and we can’t do that when we’re on autopilot or taking the safe road. I’m not sure I’ve really thought about it that way before but it makes sense.
I encourage you to get a copy of Epic Content Marketing and read it cover to cover. Pulizzi is a good writer and a great storyteller so it’s not a hard to get through it. The book fills in all the gaps for a content marketing project and provides the reader with the confidence to ‘be epic’. I highly recommend it.
What’s your favourite marketing book?
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