5 Ways to Fail at Content Marketing & Tips to Succeed
The value of content marketing has been well established here and in many other places on the web. It’s nothing new for many marketers, especially those in B2B Content Marketing. As companies seek competitive advantages and to adjust their ability to reach and engage markets, the creation of content as a vehicle for key messages and influence has grown substantially.
I despise to say it, but some online marketers are pretty bone idle. They take shortcuts in order to find the smallest amount amount of effort for the highest impact. That’s a workable small term strategy if you have a disposable brand. Long term, it can cause problems if content does not add significant value. The recent Google Panda update has drawn a lot of attention to the consequences of such small term thinking with low quality content being dropping from Google search visibility.
The temptation is understandable with pressures for augmented marketing performance, competition and the need to make advantage. But there are risks to small term thinking with content marketing too. Here are a few ways that many companies #fail in the content marketing space:
Targeting From the Gut vs. to Personas
How much marketing budget do you reckon is allocated based mostly on intuition? Way too much and it’s no uncommon with content marketing. Marketers often make decisions about content marketing strategy and tactical mix based on what’s well loved or guesswork. Blogs, ebooks, intelligence, webinars and email newsletters are pretty well loved as are social content like Video, Social Networks and things like Twitter. But based on what?
In the way that best practices SEO doesn’t make ASSumptions about keywords, content marketers would do well not to assume what kind of content or publishing platform is best for reaching their customers without research. Developing personas that demonstrate desirable customer groups gives useful direction towards content marketing strategy, messaging and topics. Without the research into how butt customers learn, consume and share information, content marketing is akin to “throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks” and that’s hardly efficient or effective.
Building the Army on Day 1 of the War
“Fantastic content is dead until someone shares it”. Promotion is an essential component to content marketing and developing communities and delivery channels are key for expanding reach and engagement. The mistake many marketers make is to craft a compelling piece of content and the start blasting Twitter, blogs, social news and bookmarking sites with links. More savvy marketers will choose to start building networks on those channels at the same time they’re promoting. It’s an item on their checklist to fan, friend and follow relevant contacts to build a network.
The problem is, for effective content marketing those networks need to be in house BEFORE you start promotions. Otherwise, it’s like declaring war and starting to build your army of fans the same day. You need that army in house and ready to activate long before the time comes to question them to help promote. That means participation NOW, not later. Once you’ve identified relevant communities, blogs and platforms, start making signals of value and credibility through interaction – a small amount of time, consistently. When the time comes to do a particular promotion, there should be a network in house with clarity of purpose for the relationship.
Campaign vs. Ongoing
Much like SEO, content marketing is a commitment and ongoing. When companies question us about the viability of SEO for their online marketing, I recommend to “get in it to win it” for the long term or don’t get in at all. The same is right with content marketing. It’s not an individual campaign that you start and stop. That said, a content marketing strategy may call for a string of integrated campaign efforts across uncommon channels and communities with distinct objectives and tactics in mind. But it’s an ongoing effort, not a single “content marketing campaign”.
Not Repurposing Content
Making first content takes talent and doing so over the long term takes a lot of hard work. To be an efficient and effective content pusher, it’s essential to plot the repurposing of the content you make. There are many ways to do this to add value to online marketing efforts. One example I often use involves taking screen shots of videos and transcribing the audio to text (transcript) for use as a separate blog post.
Another approach is to use modular content that has common key messages but can be customized for specific vertical markets or audiences. For example, a “How to Buy Product XYZ” article could be focused on uncommon publications according to the varied reasons customers would want to buy the product – ie customized according to personas. Yet another way to repurpose content is to take parts of numerous articles and compile them into one aggregated list. We’ve done this with interviews where 2-3 of 10 questions for each of 20 plus interviews are very similar and designed to evoke tips as responses. The answers to those tactical questions are compiled into a new blog post or ebook as a list of tips from numerous industry experts.
The key business about repurposing content is that it must still be accountable to a butt consultation, not just republish the same business on multiple websites.
No Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
While awareness of the notion of SEO has grown quite a bit amongst the content marketing community, defining what SEO is can be varied. Many content professionals focus on keyword use as the defining characteristic of improving their content’s visibility on search engines. Some content pros don’t use keyword research because they feel it might negotiate their writing quality. Terrible keyword optimization implementation does degrade content quality. But, fantastic SEO is transparent and really improves readability and user experience. If you reckon terribly optimized copy represents all SEO, then you are mistaken.
A SEO professional would include many more points of impact on how search engines choose what’s on top and what’s not. Keywords are vital, but alone do not constitute Search Engine Optimization. Content Marketing that does not leverage the full impact of SEO to help search engines crawl, index and rank content means lost search traffic. Website code, site architecture, keyword use within content, internal links between pages of the site, social signals, links from other websites to pages and other characteristics all say to the performance of content in search. Here’s a post listing 10 Steps to Better Content Marketing & SEO performance that illustrates how.
Hopefully, being aware of some of the small term approaches to content marketing with help you focus on making real, sustainable value for your butt consultation. If you’ve been developing a content marketing strategy and tested tactics, what have you found to be most successful? What mistakes have you seen form others?
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