Epic Content Marketing
The book that told brands to stop renting attention and start owning an audience.
- Author
- Joe Pulizzi
- Published
- 2013, McGraw-Hill
- Core idea
- The content tilt
- Test
- Would the audience choose this?
Forms & parts of speech
What the book says
Epic Content Marketing defines the discipline its author had spent a decade naming: build a subscribed audience by publishing genuinely valuable content in one niche, consistently, before asking for anything. The machinery — the content tilt (an angle no one else owns), the six principles of epic content (fill a need, be consistent, be human, have a point of view, avoid sales-speak, be best of breed), the editorial mission statement, and subscribers as THE metric that matters.
The ideas people quote
The tilt — if your content disappeared, would anyone miss it?; John Deere's The Furrow (publishing since 1895) as the founding case; the six principles as a publishable quality bar; channel discipline — master one platform before adding another; and the mission-statement formula: core audience + what you deliver + their outcome.
How to read it now
It reads as the constitution under every successful B2B media program — and the indictment of most 'content strategies,' which fail its first test (filling a real need) on day one. Pair with Content Inc. for the entrepreneurial sequence and Handley for the sentence-level craft; together they're the field's complete syllabus.
Synonyms & antonyms
Synonyms
Origin & history
Written as the synthesis of Pulizzi's decade evangelizing the term he'd used since 2001 at Penton — and of the case library accumulated through the Content Marketing Institute (founded 2011). McGraw-Hill published it September 2013; Fortune named it a must-read business book.
Etymology: source.
Usage trends
Search interest for this term over the last five years:
Common questions
- Who wrote Epic Content Marketing?
- Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, published 2013 by McGraw-Hill.
- What is the content tilt?
- An angle or niche where your content can be the world's best — different enough that the audience would miss it if it vanished.
- What are the six principles?
- Fill a need, be consistent, be human, have a point of view, avoid sales-speak, and be best of breed.
Related tools & calculators
- toolCAC calculator
- toolLTV-to-CAC ratio
Resources & people to follow
- bookEpic Content Marketing — Joe Pulizzi (the subject)
- bookContent Inc. — Joe Pulizzi
- referenceContent Marketing Institute
Curated, non-competitor resources verified per term.
Related training
- moduleContent marketing
Disciplines
Areas of marketing where epic content marketing is a core concern: