I recently attended a SIPA conference where three talented, intelligent, experienced publishing professionals gave three fairly different perspectives on “content marketing.”

Each of them had very interesting things to say. One focused on “purposeful content” — that you should have a goal for anything that you write. Another focused on “story,” and how businesses should have a reason for their existence, and the things they write should promote that mission. The last spoke of it in more tactical terms — the kinds of troubles you can get into with advertisers and how to deal with them.

It was all great stuff, but it wasn’t clear to me what held it all together. I asked whether the phrase “content marketing” is so broad as to be somewhat useless.

The word “content” itself is a pretty amorphous term. Publishers are involved in so many things today — words on a page, words on a website, data, charts, video, audio, training, etc. — that we often need a catch-all term to describe what we do, and “content” seems to be the best bet. But, once again, it’s so broad as to be somewhat meaningless, and in some ways it’s misleading.

It’s misleading because publishers really aren’t in the “content” business. We’re in the solutions business. We don’t sell “content,” we sell aspirations and goals. We sell money and sex. We sell power. We sell living a better life when you’re 90. We most definitely do not sell “content” because nobody wants to buy it.

If you don’t believe me, send me a check for $100 and I’ll send you some “content.” Deal?

So the word “content” doesn’t contribute much to the phrase “content marketing.” What about “marketing”?

A loose definition of “marketing” might be “a series of activities to promote and sell products or services.” But in the context of “content marketing,” that goal gets even broader. It includes things you write on your blog to become an opinion leader — to draw people in so that you can sell them later. It includes material that is valuable in its own right, that might lead to sales, like the Jello Cookbook. In short, it includes all those elements of “marketing” that are hard to justify because we can’t calculate the return on investment.

So “content marketing” seems to be the murky intersection of two vague concepts.

I’m not against any of these activities in any way. We should always write with a purpose. A company should have a story to tell about why it exists. We should learn how to deal with advertisers, and we should use all kinds of creative means to brand ourselves and our companies as the place to go for certain information.

That’s all good stuff, but I think it loses some precision when we lump it all under the odd phrase, “content marketing.”

I don’t say that to be pedantic. The point of precision is not to win points in an argument on Facebook. The point is to know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and whether you can measure if you’re doing it well. I don’t think “content marketing” contributes to that kind of analysis because it’s too squishy.

Please let me know if you agree or disagree.

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