In honor of Juneteenth, I thought I share a post about one of my favorite inventors, George Washington Carver. But I believe that he was not only an incredible inventor, he was also a person who used content marketing in a very powerful way.
Read on and you’ll understand why I say that.
By the way, this post originally appeared on one of my other sites in a post called Content Marketing Isn’t About Manipulation. It’s About Serving People back in January 2012.
George Washington Carver Inventor and Content Marketer?
You might not realize this, but…
George Washington Carver was not just an amazing inventor. He was a content marketer.
What am I talking about?
I discovered that he used “content marketing” (what I’d also call “educational marketing”) to help revive the south. (NOTE: You can see my personal definition of “content marketing” here.)
How did he do this?
George Washington Carver’s “School on Wheels”
He started a “School on Wheels” and went out to farms so he could teach farmers how to revive soil by planting peanuts and sweet potatoes.
Not only did he do that, but after teaching them, he went to his lab to create markets for these plants and ended up inventing 300 uses for the peanut and 118 uses for the sweet potato.
You see, Carver used content marketing (through teaching/speaking) to not only revive the soil but also revive the economy as well.
This teaches us something important that we all need to understand.
Content Marketing Isn’t About Tricking People, It’s About Serving Them
Content marketing isn’t about manipulating people or tricking them into buying your product or service. It’s about helping people.
If you have a solution to their problems, if you have an answer to their unanswered questions, if you have a way to genuinely make their lives better, it’s your duty to reach them.
Not just so that you can make a sale or receive income, but so they can be helped.
Content marketing allows you to do this by being able to educate people and build a relationship with them, so they can see working with you (or purchasing your product or service) as a natural foregone conclusion.
That’s what content marketing is really about… or at least should be.
It reminds me of this well-known quote from Zig Ziglar, “You can have everything you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want.”
So along with all of the other important ingredients for creating effective content marketing, let me add this missing ingredient… sincerity.
Adding that unwritten and unseen ingredient could change others’ lives and yours in the process.
Here are two questions for you to focus on as you try to achieve this with your content:
- What do my prospects need to know and understand so they can see greater results in their lives?
- What do they need to know and understand before (or so that) the solution you’re selling can really help them?
Figure out how to answer those questions and then go and serve people with your content.
