How Content Hackers Win Marketing

Everything is hackable these days.

You can hack your office, hack your home, and hack your life. There are car hacks, hat hacks, dad hacks, and relationship hacks.

So when I saw this infographic from CoSchedule on “content hacking,” I admit I rolled my eyes a bit. But the more I read, the more intrigued I became.

The term growth hacking, coined by Sean Ellis, describes a marketing technique developed by startups to sell products and gain exposure. And we all know what content marketing is, but we’ll say it one more time for the folks in the back: it’s marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media.

So content hacking, then, is a mashup between growth hacking and content marketing. It combines the more traditional, carefully-planned, highly-budgeted, well-branded content marketing approach with an experimental, rapid-fire, low-cost, viral results-driven growth hacking approach.

A content hacker might have these unique characteristics:

• Focused on growth, traffic, content, and the bottom line.
• Not interested in following style guides.
• Prioritizes fitting the content to the audience, not the product to the market.
• Able to turn contacts into connections.
• SEO-minded and data-driven.

Is the term “hacking” overused? Sure. But don’t let that stop you from gleaning some good tips here about how you can combine the best of two very different marketing worlds into one marketing powerhouse.