An Exploratory Analysis of Essential Elements of Content Marketing

Abstract

The term “content marketing” has not only raised the interest of marketing practitioners in recent years, but also of marketing scholars. Numerous definitions and explanations of content marketing abound but mostly from a practitioner’s point of view while there is still a general lack of a more scholarly definition. In addition to its many definitions and related perspectives, content marketing is also referred to under a number of umbrella terms, which impede a more universal understanding of what it entails as well as how it should be practised. However, not all sharing of content constitutes content marketing (Carragee 2014), which renders many of the existing definitions as potentially theoretically unsound adding to the current confusion.