By John Lavey | Hammock President and COO
While wrapping up several year-end customer media and marketing content projects, I remembered the story at the opening of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, “This Is Water,” at Kenyon College in 2005.
The story tells the tale of two young fish who meet an older fish as they are swimming. The older fish nods at the younger ones and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” The two young fish continue swimming, until one looks at the other and says, “What the hell is water?”
Some aspects of marketing content are like the water in which a fish swims—elemental and obvious. Social media and basic SEO practices should already be a part of your organization’s content management strategy. Customer experience or engagement, research and analytics, and automation should be part of the infrastructure of marketing content, not the goal.
Looking back over the last year’s discussions with healthcare marketers, it seems as if many marketers are focused on achieving the infrastructure of marketing content, with no eye toward objectives. A content infrastructure should be in place to achieve one of two simple goals:
- Help those who need your product or service become your customer.
- Help those who already own your product or service understand how to use them to reach their goals.
And that’s all there is to it. From Hammock, we wish you a Happy Holidays, and we will see you in the New Year!
Image Credit | iStock
About Hammock Healthcare Idea Email | This post is part of Hammock’s award-winning Idea Email series. Idea Emails are sent every other week and share one insightful marketing idea. Idea Email comes in two flavors: Original and Healthcare. To subscribe to the original Idea Email (general marketing ideas), click here . To subscribe to the Healthcare Idea Email (healthcare marketing ideas), click here.