As I often say on my blog and website, most of the people plunge into the depths of content marketing without knowing what they are doing, and without knowing what their audience wants. They just know that they need to publish content and then they start publishing it. They hire a couple of cheap content writers, give them 20-30 odd keywords and then leave them to their devices. Since this content is cheap, they don’t take it seriously, without realising that they are paying money to harm their own business.
It’s very important that you know your audience before writing content and starting your content marketing campaign. Whom are you writing for? Have you ever thought of what your target audience wants?
You know what? I learned this at a personal cost, although it was a blessing in disguise because after learning from that mistake I started my content writing and content marketing services. In fact, it wasn’t as bad as I often make it out to be, but inadvertently, around 10 years ago I committed a content marketing mistake that I shouldn’t have, considering I advise clients what sort of content they should publish and market.
I used to publish lots of web design articles. I must had invested more than a year creating around 2000 articles writing on various topics, publishing some on my own website and submitting some to other websites (those days we didn’t have blogs). What happened? The traffic that I attracted was of those people who wanted to learn web design rather than those who wanted to hire a web designer. I should have tried to understand what sort of content those people who were looking for a web designer, were looking for.
Anyway, in this Whiteboard Friday blog post Rand Fishkin has explained in detail why it is important to know what your core audience wants before investing time and money in writing your content and content marketing. The video is embedded below.