As announced on Friday, today marks the beginning of a slightly amended chapter in the SlopeFillers journey. One of the key changes is quite simple and probably makes you wonder why I didn’t think of it earlier.

That change is weekly post topics instead of a sporadic buffet of marketing this-and-thats.

So, with deeper analysis, examples, and insight coming later in the week, I get the lovely privilege of introducing the topic that will be under the lens until Friday: content marketing.

Let’s start with a foundation so we’re all on the same page.

Middlemen
There are many ways to approach this topic, but I often think about content marketing as the classic warehouse-seller catch phrase of “removing the middleman”. For example, a simplified bike-selling flow goes from manufacturer to bike shops to you. Each step isn’t just a step, it’s a business. Which means each requires money to be profitable. If every person in the chain wants to make $100 from every bike, something that costs $100 to build will cost you $300 to buy ($100 for the manufacturer and $100 for the shop).

I bought my latest bike from a company called Fezzari. They don’t sell their products in bike shops. Instead, everything is “direct to consumer”. They save me money by removing the costs/markups a shop would add to the chain. To use that same example, because there was no middleman, the $100 bike only cost me $200.

It’s not exactly the same, but it’s very similar in content marketing.

The New Model
Let’s say it costs $100 to produce a story. If the media company wants to make $100 on that story, you’ll need to pay $200 to put your own content (usually an ad) next to it. That $200 gets your message in front of the audience. It is then used by the media company to create more content and grow the audience (which you’d have to pay for again next time you want access).

What marketers are discovering is that when they invest in their own content (cut out the middleman), they can not only save money, but they have complete control over the content as well for better or worse. All the benefits the content provides are focused solely on their bottom line.

Things of course don’t always work so perfectly simply because ski resorts (and other businesses) aren’t media companies and they aren’t as good at both creating content and generating/maintaining an audience. The social media “follow” / “subscribe” revolution has helped that, but these channels are still a far cry from a Freeskier or a Warren Miller.

Simple Examples
Lots of sites have great content about learning to ski, skiing with families, etc. The old model would have been to pay one of those sites or sources for some ad space next to the content your audience is likely to read. The new model is what Park City did by creating their own version of the content and working to make it easily found by those same people.

I did the same for the bike company I mentioned earlier. A move that, as of last year, had supposedly earned them 250,000 visitors.

Whistler could have piggybacked on a ski movie release to promote the opening of their mountain. Instead, they created their own series of ski movies about the opening of their mountain.

In many ways SlopeFillers is content marketing. I’ve created my own content, audience, and channel. There’s no reason some resort marketing company couldn’t have created a SlopeFillers long before I did. Imagine for a second that your resort started Skiing Magazine and you had full control over the content. That’s part of the allure of content marketing.

The Possibilities
Could you be the direct source for the information, stories, and entertainment your market craves? Absolutely. And, funny thing, that’s exactly what we’ll be talking about all this week.

Let content marketing week begin!

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.