15 Powerful Quotes About Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi

Table of Contents

• 15 Epic Content Marketing Quotes by Joe Pulizzi 
• Key Takeaways 
• Conclusion 
• FAQs 

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Gone are the days when brands used to say, “content is king.” It’s rather evident today that the sheer scale of conversation around various interests and aspirations has turned content from the king to a kingdom itself. Content, today, is at the heart of all business relationships and transactions: followers, likes, loyalty, commerce, consideration and even, advocacy. 

One of the early adopters who spotted this potential and trend back in the day was Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute. His ideas can only be titled Epic Content Marketing. 

The platform itself emerged in 2011 and, since then, has consistently advanced the practice of content marketing. Their core belief is to educate and inspire people to use content marketing at its very best, but their final goal is somewhat unusual for a platform of this scale. Joe Pulizzi believes that people will continually adopt the concept of content marketing at elementary stages. At some point in the future, the need for such a platform would disappear. 

This ideology makes their cause noble and philanthropic. In the many years of their expertise, Joe has revolutionized the idea of content marketing various times. Here are 15 epic content marketing quotes from Joe Pulizzi that everyone needs to live by!

15 Epic Content Marketing Quotes by Joe Pulizzi

1. “A blog post is like a miniskirt … it needs to be long enough to cover the essentials but short enough to keep it interesting.” ― Joe Pulizzi, Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses. 

As many in the industry call him, Joe is a master of analogies around Content Marketing. He knows how to oversimplify an idea to a fundamental. In this quote from his book Content Inc. How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences, he speaks about the concept of giving away information. If one shares all their brand secrets on the home page or the title of an emailer, why should the audience even bother scrolling? It is pretty much like storytelling; you reveal the right character at the right time, so the audience enjoys it as the plot unfolds. 

2. “When you’re creating content, and you’re getting feedback from the audience, it allows you to hone your vision, as well as embed your vision ultimately with whatever it is that you’re creating.”― Joe Pulizzi, Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses 

In the same revolutionary book, Joe also highlights another important aspect of building an epic content marketing strategy: feedback. Content should never be seen as a monologue by the brand but rather a dialogue between the brand and its audience. Once a content creator starts listening in on the topics, feedbacks, questions, queries, comments, and conversations that its audience offers, the brand becomes aware. It’s rightly said that only an aware brand can engage with its audience because an isolated brand doesn’t care about the audience but only about its products. 

3. “Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling.”― Joe Pulizzi, Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less.

Now that must be a little confusing, no? How does one sell without actually selling? The answer to that very question is the genius of content marketing. In this form of inbound structure, the brand’s needs are to pull the customers in through the hook of a genuine conversation. The brand should communicate about interests that matter to them, and in no time, the audience will start picking the product/service. The crux of all selling, after all, is communication. 

4. “Content Marketing comes down to commitment. There’s no halfway. You’re either in or you’re out.”- Joe Pulizzi. 

There are a lot of good brands out there which occasionally create interesting content that is relevant to their audiences. But the thing about that seasoned approach is that season’s change. They lack persistence. Consistently delivering great content creates a compounding effect. To show you just what compounding can do to a business, below is an analogy that shows you the power of consistently performing great. 

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Like you see here, a brand that continually delivers good content will have a much higher recall with its potential customers and audiences. People would look up to the brand and engage more with them against any other brand that performs well but inconsistently. 

5. “Your customers don’t care about you, your products, or your services. They care about themselves. Content marketing is about creating interesting information your customers are passionate about so they actually pay attention to you.” – Joe Pulizzi. 

This is one of the most important learnings from Joe Pulizzi and his epic content marketing techniques. Letting go of the existential question is as difficult for a brand as for a person; “It isn’t about you.” People care about themselves, and they will always pick a brand that adds value to their life. So a brand’s content should also do the same. Think of your content platforms as a piece of expensive real estate: every inch of content space has to add value to the audience’s life. If it does, they will automatically be more interested in your product/service and even more so in what you have to say. 

6. “There is no holy grail to content marketing, but if there was one, it would be the email subscriber.” – Joe Pulizzi.

Email marketing is one of the most underrated content marketing channels, but the power of email is immense. It offers an opportunity to build a personal relationship with each customer and a platform to turn loyal customers into brand ambassadors. 

7. “Content marketing is not about what you sell; it’s about what you stand for.”- Joe Pulizzi. 

Conscious buying is real, and nobody understands this better than Joe Pulizzi. He knows that people care about values like where the product is sourced from, where it was manufactured, whether the brand is gender-inclusive, and more. The more you align with their values, the higher your brand’s chances of discovery and recall.

8. “Content marketing is not a campaign—it’s an approach, a philosophy, and a business strategy.” – Joe Pulizzi. 

This can be seen as an extension of the compounding technique. It’s not as if your brand can adopt the inbound content marketing techniques on some platforms and ignore the others. Content marketing should be in the brand’s DNA and hold the highest regard in its business model for it to work. If your brand sees it as an add-on, not an essential, it will likely not give you the desired results. 

9. “Good content marketing makes a person stop, read, think, and behave differently.”― Joe Pulizzi, Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less.

Think of Joe’s epic content marketing strategy like this: when was the last time you stopped, read, thought, and behaved differently to a piece of content? Chances are, it was when the content wasn’t just informative or interesting but compelling. The writing, words, and understanding of concepts were so spot-on that you ended up engaging with it far more than you usually would. That’s the mark of a great piece of content, one that makes you break the cycle of mundane. It should make your customer do something they usually won’t: click, like, share, reply or maybe even purchase.

10. “Loosen up. Authenticity trumps perfection when connecting with readers.”― Joe Pulizzi, Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less.

In one of his talks, Joe Pulizzi talks about authenticity. He explained this content marketing strategy in its simplest possible form; we aren’t friends with people because they’re perfect. We don’t fall in love with people because they’re perfect. We do it because they are real. 

So if actions like friendship and love are dictated by authenticity, why should marketing be left behind? A brand with the courage to own up to who they are is valued far more than any brand that projects a perfect image of itself. So, one of the cores of your strategy should be to keep it real.

11. “Before you create any more great content, figure out how you’re going to make it first.” – Joe Pulizzi. 

Isn’t it odd that some brands seem to create great content consistently and so many others simply do it once in a while? The reason behind these spikes is hit and trial. A great content marketing strategist knows that before creating great content comes the research of great content. Ask yourself questions like, “What has worked in the past?”, “Why did this piece of content perform well, and this one didn’t?” These questions put your ideas in perspective and help separate the good from the mediocre ones. 

12. “Mediocre content will hurt your brand more than doing nothing at all.” – Joe Pulizzi. 

As a brand, it’s easy to fall into the trap of “something is better than nothing” because “Nothing is much better than a random something.” Our content should be thought through, examined well, tested correctly, and judged from various lenses before out there. Because, like words, content once published cannot be retracted easily. Take your time building a robust content strategy but do it well enough. 

13. “The easiest way to turn off your community members is to broadcast the same message across multiple channels. Instead, determine the kind of content that interests the members of your community in a way that is useful to them.” – Joe Pulizzi (Source) 

Imagine you follow a clothing brand, and this brand is running an end-of-season sale. You see their sale message inside the store, where it makes sense since you’re already in the store to purchase. You then see it on a billboard; that’s also okay. But then you’re on YouTube watching a football game highlights, and you see their ad as a video again. And then again, while you’re shopping for furniture online. You’ll start getting agitated and despising the brand. That is why a brand must understand the context of a platform before cracking the platform’s content. Mirroring techniques are obsolete and doing more harm than, if any, good.

14. “Today, starting and growing a business has more to do with publishing than at any other moment in history.” – Joe Pulizzi. 

Every brand must conduct itself like a publisher in today’s digital age. Every content creator is a journalist aiming to create engaging content which makes it to the headlines. A brand with 100k followers on Instagram, 200k on Facebook, and a million subscribers on YouTube has to churn out content continually, so the audience engages with it. That’s how every brand has become a publisher: publishing branded videos, collaborations, explainers, unboxing, reviews, testimonials, and so much more. 

Look at this series by Netflix – a streaming platform whose ultimate aim should be to get paying subscribers is creating a few content series for their Instagram handle. Yup, a series produced by Netflix to be only seen on Instagram. A show designed to promote other shows on the brand’s platform.

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This is a classic example of what publishing can do for a brand; pull and convert. It shows how content is valued far more than a brand’s promise and how conducting the brand as a publisher is more important than simply talking about features like ad-free content, 4k streaming quality, new shows, etc.

15. “Stop writing about everything. So many brands create content and try to cover everything instead of focusing on the core niche that they can position themselves as an expert around. No one cares about your special recipe… Find your niche, and then go even more niche.”  – Joe Pulizzi (Source)

Any industry is too big for a single player to eat up the market. If the world has a place for both Coke and Pepsi, it surely has enough space for your competitors. But the difference between them and us comes from the content marketing strategy. Finding a unique conversation and owning that very topic will get you more laurels than simply trying to be an expert about everything. It’s easier to own conversations around the Keto diet than to own conversations around all healthy food habits. Find your brand’s communication niche, and you’ll have your loyal audience. 

Key Takeaways

• Content is at the heart of all business relationships and transactions: followers, likes, loyalty, commerce, consideration and even, advocacy. 
• The Content Marketing Institute’s core belief is to educate and inspire people to use content marketing at its very best, but their final goal is somewhat unusual for a platform of this scale
• Our content should be thought through, examined well, tested correctly, and judged from various lenses before out there. 
• A brand must understand the context of a platform before cracking the platform’s content.

Conclusion

These epic content marketing strategies by Joe Pulizzi have helped thousands of brands and millions of individuals from the content field to create stunning strategies and build successful brands. Work on the ones that are relevant to your brand and start building a robust inbound content strategy now. 

Once you start bringing these epic content marketing strategies to life, your brand’s story will come to life that will not just connect with the audience but inspire them to build a relationship with your brand.

FAQs