For a guy that doesn’t know a lot about card playing, I’ve always had a fascination with Poker. Like my fascination with marketing, I can’t help but admire the strategy that is involved in altering the perceptions of another person-even while holding the weaker cards.

In poker, the strength of a hand is increased by having multiple cards of the same value, all the cards being from the same suit, or having all the cards with consecutive values. In content marketing, the strength of a campaign is increased by having multiple touches that add value to your prospects or buyers, distributing content that revolves around a specific topic or offering content that has a consecutive theme and resonates with your audience.

My wife receives a custom publication called food & family. This quarterly content marketing tool distributed by Kraft Foods includes simple recipes and cooking tips and is mailed to over 12 million households per issue. It contains hundreds of advertisements in less than 70 pages but you would never realize it without looking carefully. My wife, who is an excellent cook and can run circles around most of the recipes in there, genuinely gets excited when this small publication arrives. She enjoys sifting through the pages to get new ideas or to read the stories submitted by women “like her.”

The Kraft publication is so well laid out that you hardly notice more than the eleven full page ads promoting specific products-these happen to look right in place with the ads traditionally expected in a magazine anyway. It’s worth mentioning that the recipes in food & Family are far from being the best recipes available yet millions of households anticipate its arrival-mine included. Food & Family is a great example of content marketing at work. Their tips and recipes may be worth less than the scraps of the world’s finest restaurants but they have certainly mastered how to play their lesser hand.

Your hand may contain less than a royal-flush, but if executed correctly you can still win the content marketing game with nothing more than a high-card. The trick is not trying to get the highest hand-it’s in altering the perceptions others have about the cards you possess. There will always be competitors with more money, products with more features and business owners with more charisma. You will always be in front and behind somebody at every step. The trick is to come from a position of strength and authority and to make sure that the hand you do have is packaged and presented so that perceptions are altered and people become nervous about buying into the alternatives.

Michael Orr is CEO of ContentMarketingGroup in Spokane, Washington. CMG helps lay the foundation for increased revenues through customer-centric communication programs that resonate with today’s buyers, promote buying behaviors, and transform companies and professionals into industry thought leaders. Michael can be reached at morr@cmgemail.net or at 509-922-0999. You can visit their website at http://www.ContentMarketingGroup.com