One of the refrains you’ll hear from me a lot is that Good Content is Targeted Content.

We’ve talked about *creating* relevant, useful, targeted content before, but it doesn’t stop there.

Lets say, I’m marketing procurement software. An article about procurement could be the most insightful thing in the world but if you’re not getting it in front of Heads of Procurement and they are not engaging with the content, what’s the point?

In other words, content without context is just noise.

Good content – content that drives tangible results rather than fluffy vanity metrics – is content consumed by the right people, at the right time (another mantra of mine).

How?

The key is in community. Community is one of the most important, and yet most neglected factors in a successful content marketing campaign. If you’re creating brilliant content but it’s just not driving results – this could be exactly what you’re missing.

Content marketers should be leveraging the power of communities to feed in and promote relevant content. That procurement article? 1000 times more effective if you share it with a community of procurement specialists.

What do I mean by community?

Well, I definitely don’t mean your token Facebook page or LinkedIn Group. I don’t mean that place where you lazily cross-post some regurgitated content from your Twitter feed, just so you feel you’ve *done* your content marketing for the day.

A real community is a group of like-minded professionals who share a deep and common interest. It’s a group of people who are interested and engaged and interacting sincerely.

I sometime compare online community to a conferences,– a place where people happily pay to go to fuel their passion, hear about best practices and innovation, debate with thought-leaders, share war-stories, and network. The only difference communities run 365 days a year, 24/7.