Content marketing has come a long way, and one might naturally wonder what forms it took before the arrival of the internet, social media and digitalization era. Let’s walk through the history of content marketing with the help of infographic that highlights the crucial milestones. 

  • lifehacks and approaches for enhancing farming 
  • relationships with customers over direct advertising
  • sharing expertise through valuable information
  • professional advice for building trust and dependence on the brand
  • 4 million admirers by 1912
  • 400 pages on car maintenance and advice on travel
  • useful maps, listings, and instructions for motorists
  • 35,000 free issues
  • mission to raise demand and interest for vehicles and ultimately — Michelin tires
  • focus on design
  • free copies of door-to-door recipe book
  • niche marketing and targeting
  • appealing and useful content for housewives
  • engaged famous artists for illustrations
  • $1 million sales by 1906
  • entertaining comedy and musical sketches
  • informative civic and farm programs
  • targeting the lucrative farming industry
  • advertising built around the amusing content of the radio show
  • “Put a tiger in your tank” catchy call-to-action
  • branded content for TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines
  • a consistent message across channels
  • “Year of the Tiger” as stated by Time magazine in 1964
  • innovative promotion via several channels
  • attractive action hero at the core of the story narrative
  • the invention of content crossover for selling toy soldiers
  • over 20% of boys between 5-12 years of age had one or more soldiers
  • the democratization of content marketing
  • the first blog is created by Justin Hall
  • brands use blogs for raising awareness, entertaining and engagement
  • Facebook (2003), LinkedIn (2003), Youtube (2005), Twitter (2006), Instagram (2010) present new opportunities for brands
  • competition creates the necessity of ranking algorithms
  • сontent expands to webinars, podcasts, videos
  • users develop ‘banner blindness’ as a call for more subtle and non-intrusive approaches
  • AI influences analytics in content marketing
  • сontent is optimized according to the growing impact of voice search and personal assistants
  • interactive content with AR/VR gains hundreds of millions of views
  • vertical videos, online streams drive engagement
  • podcasts are popular among the high-income audience
As you can see, content has always been a powerful tool that bears qualitative and quantitative benefits. So make sure your content marketing strategy is developed to deliver results.