I don’t know about you, but it seems like I read another article about content marketing every 4.7 seconds.
I’m sick of reading them. Content marketing is all the rage. Everyone is talking about it. Every agency purports to do it. Every marketer is hastily adding details about content marketing expertise to their LinkedIn profile. Google’s shift to content SEO has made content marketing King!!!
And yet…most marketers are failing at content marketing.
Are Marketers Failing at Content Marketing?
Yes, yes they are. Most marketers either aren’t actually doing content marketing or they aren’t generating anything useful from their content marketing. A recent study found that 3/4s of marketers that say they are doing content marketing haven’t seen any actual leads as a result.
Why? Why are they failing? Based on our fairly extensive content marketing expertise, there are 6 reasons marketers fail at content marketing.
Many marketers start down the content marketing rabbit hole without every considering why they’re actually doing it. They just start writing stuff because they’re supposed to. ‘Yay, I wrote something, I’m doing content marketing!’ Or, they start posting stuff on YouTube because they’re supposed to. Or, they start sharing stuff on social media because they’re supposed to.
That’s not a content strategy. It’s not even content marketing. It’s just doing stuff.
Before you start any actual content marketing tactic, first begin by deciding what you want to accomplish with your vaunted and much-anticipated content marketing strategy. What’s your goal?
Are you blogging to increase organic traffic? Are you posting on YouTube to create a following? How will you generate leads from your content marketing? How many leads do you hope to generate each month? Will any actual revenue come from your content marketing activities?
What do you want to accomplish?
Just creating content with no purpose in mind is silly and a gigantic waste of time. And yet, that’s what most marketers do. They just start doing stuff without really trying to accomplish anything.
That’s bad.
Some marketers simply don’t know where to start. Would it be best to start blogging every week? Or, should I start a video series on YouTube? Or, should I start creating White Papers and Ebooks?
Most marketers simply don’t know how to go about content marketing.
And, that’s silly. Because, as we said above, there are approximately 87,539 articles written about effective content marketing every single day.
I have heard small business owners say something like this, “I’m just own an auto repair shop. What could I write about? There’s nothing to write about with my business.”
This is a dumb thing to say.
Trust me, your business can provide useful tips, tricks, and secrets to your audience. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in.
Every. Business.
This is a legitimate issue. Some businesses can’t afford someone to create content all day long every day. So…who’s going to do it?
Some professional bloggers want $200+ to write a single blog post for you. I don’t know about you, but that seems like a lot of money. Agencies will quite often roll content creation into their SEO strategy. Others offer it as an additional service.
(Note to Agencies: Content creation should be front-and-center for your SEO strategy at this point).
It shouldn’t require Congressional approval and a vote from U.N. Security Council to publish a new blog post. It shouldn’t require permission from the Politburo to upload a new video to the corporate YouTube channel.
And yet, this is how many companies operate.
These companies trust employees so little that they can’t even allow employees they pay to create content to create content. Every blog post, video, social media update, and even landing page edit require approval.
This is silly. Requiring approval on every piece of content only accomplishes one thing: slowing the content creation process down to such a degree that it loses effectiveness. If your blog only gets a few hundred visitors (or less) every day, it isn’t worth running every blog through the entire executive staff before you post it. That’s dumb, silly, and a waste of freaking time.
This might be the #1 content creation problem (I think I already said that about one of the other reasons above, oh well). Most content marketers don’t create enough content to move the needle. Creating one blog every month isn’t going to drive mass amounts of organic traffic.
If you want to make your content marketing worthwhile, you need to create a lot of content over an extended period of time.
If you want to generate leads from your content, make sure that you create content that is designed to generate leads.
