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.