A lot of us so-called content marketers talk about content marketing as if it’s a new discipline, but the idea that a product or company needs to be associated with credible, relevant content is as old as marketing itself.

It’s not as if content is suddenly more valuable than it used to be. Instead, the trend that has given rise to “content marketing” is the widespread discovery that marketers can do more than associate themselves with great content. They can produce great content themselves. When marketers adopt the role of content producer, the result is content marketing.

The implications of this trend are enormous, but the fundamental value of content is the same. One reason I think that some companies fail at content marketing is because they never appreciated the true value of great content. So even though they might take on the role of content producer and pay lip service to content marketing, their financial and human investment says otherwise. They fail to produce top-notch content.

Another way of putting this is that everyone with an advertising budget can turn in to a content marketer by producing their own newsletters, blogs and websites with content, but if they don’t put the invest the same attention and resources as professional newsletters, blogs and websites, the strategy will ultimately fail.