• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, May 4, 2011

CAPTIVA ISLAND, Fla. -- Meeting some resistance among marketers years ago about a "custom publishing" tack, Joe Pulizzi just re-branded it as "content marketing" and the interest level jumped.

On Wednesday at the MediaPost Email Insider Summit, the founder of the Content Marketing Institute told email marketers that they are in the content business. There is a need to publish that lets customers feel they are receiving valuable information and not just a hard sell.

Whatever the marketing channel -- print, TV or email -- "you have to create the most interesting, the most need-to-have content ... you are content marketers, you are in this business."

Pulizzi, the keynote speaker, said he'll ask a marketer to lay out all its collateral on a table -- brochures, magazines, email newsletters -- and he finds they can't believe the tone.

"It's always about us, how can they stand us?" is how Pulizzi described their responses. "How can [customers] want to do business with us, we're sending them all this crap." A push rather than pull strategy can be less effective.

A Custom Content Council survey shows 73% of consumers would prefer to get information from a company "in the form of a collection of helpful articles over an advertisement or offer," and 61% are then more likely to buy.

Pulizzi said email marketers need to focus more on content quality, partly by designating a "Chief Content Officer," or de facto editor-in-chief, internally. The title doesn't have to exactly be "Chief Content Officer" -- Cisco has a "Content Evangelist" -- but the role should have similarities.

Who is best to fill the role? Pulizzi says a "source journalist," who has "a nose for the story." Yet, there isn't necessarily a need to look outside. Pulizzi said within a company there are people who blog and publish themselves.