Category Archives: Content Marketing

Content marketing should be fun, not stressful

There is a reason why content marketing should be fun, not stressful. I will come back to this after briefly sharing with you what my Guruji often says (he is my vocal music teacher):

When you are performing, you are communicating an emotion. In order to communicate that emotion, it needs to exist within you – you need to transmit it to your audience. If you are not enjoying your singing, neither will your audience. So if you want your audience to enjoy your performance, enjoy your performance yourself.

Coming back to content marketing, after all, it is a communication. It is in expressing art. Whether you are writing as a content writer or creating a graphic as a visual artist or creating a video as a videographer, you are expressing, you are communicating a thought or an idea, and your attitude, your inner psychology, mostly unbeknownst to you, permeates your creation.

So if your content marketing is stressful, if it is becoming painful, if you are not enjoying it, your target audience too will not enjoy it.

This Forbes blog post opines that if content marketing for you isn’t fun, maybe you’re overthinking it. Maybe you don’t have a strategy that gives you focus and peace of mind (that comes with a sense of clarity and purpose). Maybe you’re not targeting properly. Whatever are the reasons, your content marketing is no longer fun, it is stressing you out and it shows in whatever you do.

So what should you do to make your content marketing more fun and less stressful?

Personally I would suggest, find a purpose. You will no longer feel stressful if you know what you’re doing, what you are trying to achieve and whom you want to help, and why. Have a documented content marketing strategy so that at every stage you know what you’re doing and what you are accomplishing and accordingly, what you should do.

Also, this I can say as a writer, develop a conversational style. A pedantic style would be boring and uninspiring and it will eventually stress you out. Have conversations with people you are writing for. Keep yourself loose (no, I don’t mean become uncouth). By the end of the day, it will only be effective if your content marketing is fun.

Does your business need multicultural content marketing?

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Most of the online businesses these days serve a global customer and client base. All major metropolitan cities have people not just from different corners of the country, but also from different parts of the world. You wouldn’t like to alienate a particular community while implementing your content marketing strategy. If your demography includes people from different cultures, you need multicultural content marketing.

According to this NewsCred blog post, 37% of America’s population consists of minorities and the overall minority population will exceed 50% by 2050. In terms of business, according to the blog post, these 37% account for $2 trillion purchasing power. Considering the fact that the buying power of the minority groups has doubled in the last 10 years you can easily make out how important it is to target people from different cultural backgrounds through your content marketing.

This is not just the case in America. Easy availability of transport has made it possible for people to move to different regions within the country and around the world with little fuss in almost every non-conflict, peaceful country. Every major metropolitan city in the world has people of multiple ethnicities, cultures and races with immense buying power. You neither want to alienate them nor you want to exclude them in your content marketing. But how do you make sure that you incorporate a multicultural, inclusive content marketing strategy?

Use the demographic data at your disposal, as rightly explained in the above-mentioned blog post. People from different cultures prefer different content consumption platforms. For example, Latinos and Blacks are more likely to use Instagram compared to whites. The same communities are less likely to use Pinterest.

Different communities celebrate different festivals and occasions – use these opportunities to send them tailored email greetings and publish blog posts and articles on how your business can help them enjoy more. You can also use social media content updates to reach out to particular communities using demographic targeting available these days in almost every social media channel.

Well, this reminds me, I must find out similar stats for India (adding to my Todoist list).

Anyway, multicultural content marketing doesn’t mean creating neutral content that caters to a wide spectrum so that a particular community doesn’t feel excluded. This may help – playing safe – but it won’t do much good for your targeting efforts.

A good example of multicultural content marketing is the Google doodles. You must have something different for your country, but in India, Google.co.in based on different cultural events and birth anniversaries, creates different doodles. For example, this was the Google doodle that they published around the Holi festival in 2015:

The Holi Google doodle Of 2015

So do you think content marketing is easy?

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Just like any other marketing, content marketing has its own share of hardships that you have to go through in order to achieve results. Just because most of the content marketing happens on the Internet and just because it’s easier to do things on the Internet compared to the brick-and-mortar world, many people develop this false notion that content marketing should be easy or at least, if not easy, then dirt cheap. Both are misconceptions.

The author of this blog post rightly complains, “Hey, nobody told me content marketing was going to be hard!”

In the blog post the author quotes Joe Polizzi, the founder of Content Marketing Institute who says that in terms of content marketing, we may be entering the “age of disillusionment”.

Surveys show marketers are skeptical about the effectiveness of their content efforts. Many people are trying content marketing with high hopes, but they’re not seeing the engagement they expected. Professionals are confusing short-term campaign-based marketing with long-term content marketing endeavors and they’re not looking for the right kind of ROI as a result. Many are told by agencies that “going bigger” is the solution, but it often isn’t (even if they COULD justify more spend). There are great successes… But there are disappointments, too.

This is something that I have repeatedly written on my blog too, that most of content marketing efforts fail because people have no idea exactly what they are trying to achieve. In most of the cases, they confuse content marketing with relentlessly publishing blog posts and articles trying to cover the keywords to improve their search engine rankings. Whereas there is nothing wrong in trying to improve your search engine rankings, this shouldn’t be the sole objective of content marketing.

The blog post further quotes

The most common mistake is also the most mistake easiest to correct — failing to establish a foundation, or starting point. You can’t just jump in and start producing content and expect to be effective. You have to have well-documented buy cycles, buyer profiles (personas), a library of existing content and an understanding of the tools/technologies you’ll need to effectively measure your programs. And most of all you need alignment from all key internal stake holders.

When it comes to content marketing most businesses apply the “jump first and worry about how deep the pool is later” attitude. You need to have both short-term and long-term plans. You need to figure out your content marketing metrics. You need to know what you exactly aim to do.

What essential skills should you have as a content marketing copywriter?

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As content marketing goes mainstream it is becoming more and more difficult to stay ahead of the pack or to use another cliché, stand out. Since everybody seems to be using content marketing to promote business people tend to think that it must be quite easy. Yes, it is easier and more economical compared to native advertising, but just because you can run your content marketing strategy practically for free if you have got lots of time to spend on it, it doesn’t mean it comes easy. Companies like Coca-Cola are spending billions of dollars on their content marketing. The more businesses use it, the more difficult it gets to compete.

So naturally, the content marketing copywriter needs to have exceptional skills to give your business the sort of leverage it needs. Surely, content marketing doesn’t just mean writing stuff. It also means creating high-quality videos and visuals but since I am a content writer by profession, I am more interested in the writing part rather than the video and graphic part.

This Content Marketing Institute blog post by Neil Patel lists 5 essential skills that a content marketing copywriter must have in order to perform well.

Undoubtedly, copywriting is a big part of content marketing because whenever there is marketing and selling, there is copywriting. You should know how to put your point across convincingly and compellingly. You should know which words to use to convey which emotion and for what effect. According to the blog post written by Neil, the essential content marketing copywriting skills are

Great writing skills that allow you to create easy-to-read content and organize your ideas in order to make complex topics simple and convincing.
An ability to create trustworthy and compelling headlines.
Awareness of user experience.
Authority and specialization.
Awareness of the only marketing fundamentals and an ability to tailor content accordingly.

Are you committing these 7 content marketing mistakes?

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Content marketing is a great way to promote your business online but very few people actually use it the way it should be used. Encouraging thing is more and more businesses – small, medium-sized and large – are adopting content marketing as their main marketing tool. Discouraging thing is, very few businesses actually know how to carry it out.

This blog post lists 7 content marketing mistakes that you should avoid in order to reap the maximum benefit. These content marketing mistakes are:

Working without a documented content marketing strategy
Not having an editorial calendar
Not being able to strike a balance between optimizing content for humans as well as search engine algorithms
Not having a clear call to action
Undermining the importance of using images and video to further stress upon a particular point
Assuming content marketing means just publishing content on your own website or blog
Not actually “marketing” your content

Visit the link to go through the points in detail.