Today (Monday July 8) Marjorie Clayman asked a tough question on Facebook: “Is ‘content marketing’ a business movement or a clique of like-minded thinkers?”

Consultants, gurus (I still chuckle when people describe themselves as SM gurus!), and mere social media enthusiasts have a stake in new ideas and buzzwords – we want social media to stay fresh and exciting. There have been an array of new types of marketing:

1. eMarketing,
2. Digital Marketing,
3. Social Media Marketing or Facebook Marketing, and now:
4. Real-time Marketing,
5. Contextual Marketing, and
6. Content Marketing

How are the new flavors of marketing working? It will be a while until we have definitive measures of the success of different strategies, but as noted in a book I am currently reading – The Big Book of Content Marketing by Andreas Ramos – Google Trends gives us some insight as to how much interest the terms generate from the world at large.

If you are interested look at these two graphs generated from Google Trends.

eMarketing

As you can see in the first graph, “eMarketing” and “Digital Marketing” both had substantial buzz in 2004, but the number of searches for eMarketing have declined dramatically while the searches for Digital Marketing are at peak levels. Social Media Marketing and Facebook Marketing, on the other hand, started from zero in 2007, peaked in 2011 and have plateaued.

Google Trend

Content Marketing

In the second chart, content marketing also started off with some buzz in 2004, but has recently reached a peak level. Notice that using the number of searches for content marketing as the baseline, contextual and real-time marketing don’t show up in the graph….

Content-Marketing-Trends

This does not prove that content marketing is not a buzzword…. but if it is, it is at least producing some real buzz!