Content marketing is no joke. After all, if content is king, then content marketing is the rest of the court that gives the king his power – and it’s tricky business. As marketers and as business owners trying to wrap our heads around how to make it work, we’ve been fed and sold a lot of myths. Myths that, should we undertake content marketing with them in mind, will cause us to fail.
Enter Marketing Superhero Bootcamp (if Twitter is your information source of choice, check out #MarketingBootcamp). This series of 4 webinars kicked off with an explosive first session by the Wizard of Moz, Rand Fishkin. In his session, he tackled those content marketing myths and identified 5 reasons why content marketing fails.
Inspired by what I learned there, I wanted to add to his awesome presentation by including 5 things you really need to know about content marketing before jumping in.
1. It takes time.
Seriously. Good content takes time. You’ll need time to research, time to create, and time to promote – and then even more time to continue working with it through repurposing into other formats, continued outreach and promotion, and more.
Even if you’ve created the most amazing piece of content ever, if you don’t take time to do the outreach and promotion, no one’s going to see it. Just because you create it, doesn’t mean people will see it. It’s like creating a snazzy, new website and refusing to do any marketing; just because it exists, doesn’t mean people will flock to it. Even with outreach, you may not see the results you were expecting, or maybe you will and then be disappointed. Either way, whatever you do – don’t give up.
If you stop because you’re not seeing the result you thought you would, you may be quitting right before you see the upswing where you do see those results. If you stop because you received a temporary boost in traffic and then dropped off, then again you’re missing out (and you’ve fallen victim to what Rand calls the “spike of hope” and the “flatline of nope”).
It takes persistent determination and consistent efforts to make content marketing (any marketing, really) work.
2. You have to do your research (even before writing the content).
The thing with content is it has to reach people. As mentioned previously, just because you create content doesn’t mean people are going to see it or be interested in it if they do. You have to do your research to determine who is going to care about the content you want to create and why. Find out if there is a community where this content will thrive.
If you don’t have a good answers for that, then don’t bother wasting the time to create the content. As Rand stated in his presentation, “There’s no prize for hitting publish. Great content marketing has to reach people in order to reach its goal.”
3. Forget “viral.”
Whenever people talk about content marketing, they always seem to talk about success in terms of “virality” or how much a piece of content “goes viral.” Forget it! If your expectation for your content marketing efforts is to go “viral,” chances are you’re going to fail and you do your efforts injustice.
Rand has us think about it this way: good enough content generally performs well if there is a community behind it already, BUT, without a pre-existing community, only the best 0.1% of content can go “viral.” However, this is what people think content marketing is all about, and it’s so completely wrong.
“Don’t bet your marketing on being the 1 in 1,000.” - @randfish
4. Integration matters.
Content marketing isn’t about making the sale. I know, for eCommerce marketers, this can be a bit of a hard pill to swallow. We’re so ingrained to focus on conversions, ROI, and bottom lines, which are all good things; however, content marketing is about building relationships. The point is to provide information that lets a customer become familiar with you, lets them build trust with you, and build a relationship so that when it’s time for the sale, they’ll think of you. It’s about building brand advocates, not necessarily getting a sale in the first couple of visits.
The best way to build that relationship is to integrate your content into all of your channels. You want to make sure your content is built right from the ground up. This means making sure it’s optimized for the search engines. That’s right – SEO. Promoting the content with social is one thing, but if you really want to increase the potential for impact, making sure all the right elements are in the right places for solid SEO is imperative.
5. Toss out the “once and done” attitude.
This applies to content creation, curation, and promotion. If you create a good piece of content, don’t just promote it a few times and stop! Instead, continue building relationships and starting outreach by curating great content that others have created, and continue promoting your content. Great content can always be broken down and/or repurposed into other content formats in order to reach a different part of the community for which it was created.
Think about it – one piece of awesome content can easily be repurposed into a slide deck, a PDF, an infographic, a series of blog posts, a series of images with quotes for use on social, etc. The potential is there, but it’s up to you to grab it. Successful content marketing is not a once and done kind of thing. As Rand mentioned, the 0.1% of content that goes viral always make it look like an overnight success, but so many of the big, popular brands have been doing content marketing for years before getting to their current levels of visibility.
In his session, Rand said, “The vast majority of content marketing efforts are going to fail.” And, he’s right, they will, but with determination, consistency, and educated expectations, your efforts don’t have to be one of those. As he mentioned later, “The price of success is failure after failure after failure;” each failure is an opportunity to learn.
If you take nothing else away from this post, at least take this:
When it comes to content marketing, keep going, never stop learning, and don’t give up!
After that, even if your content marketing efforts do “fail,” it will be a valuable learning experience that gives you the experience you need to succeed with your next try. With that being said, you can start learning with Rand’s presentation, right here, right now: