6 Reasons Your Content Marketing Plan Will Fail…
You’ve read every eBook and whitepaper, listened to every webinar and put countless hours into planning your Content Marketing strategy. You have laid out the best strategy and now you’re ready to launch…
You publish your first blog and wait with baited breath for any sign of life…a click-through, a like, a social share…anything that will validate all the hours of works and financial commitment made to your Content Marketing plan. When nothing happens, you realize you don’t know why?
So let’s break down why the plan failed…
Myth # 1 – Content Marketing is a quick fix to our sales and marketing problems…
There are no quick fixes in life and that includes Content Marketing. The strategy of Content Marketing is one of a long-term strategy that should become a consistent part of your marketing plan. If your plan calls for a 6 month Content Marketing strategy, save your time and money and don’t bother. Content Marketing requires a long-term outlook, commitment and consistency.
Myth # 2 – Content Marketing does not require an understanding of your Buyer Persona.
If you don’t know what your Buyer Personas are, how are you deciding what content to offer? Content Marketing that does not create content for their buyer’s persona often do not have clarity on whom they are trying to reach.
Take the time to create your Buyer’s Persona as part of your Content Marketing plan.
Myth #3 – Content = Sales
The second myth is that by simply creating content, a business will have a committed customer with the first content exposure. A majority of visitors do not click on a blog, read it top to bottom, and then decide to spend more time downloading your free EBook, follow all of the social channels and share all of the content with their community.
Visitors that are first introduced to your content have just started the process of building a relationship with you and your company. They are at the beginning of the buyer’s journey..it’s up to you to guide them the rest of the way. Content Marketing is not about conversion on the first visit..or the second visit…or even the third visit.
Myth # 4 – It’s Not Important to Publish to a Community
You’ve heard all of the buzz phrases:
“Content is King”
“Create Compelling Content”
and so on..
Other than the occasional anomaly such as the famous Dollar Shave marketing video, most content does not automatically go viral.
Content has a better chance at spreading when you focus on one or more of the following:
1. Write it to inspire a community – If you’re reading this, you most likely fall into the community of business owners interested in Content Marketing.
2. Reinforce or challenge existing belief systems – Again, if you’re reading this, you may be realizing that Content Marketing by itself is not a solution.
3. Show someone how to fix a problem and provide real value.
4. Craft the content to speak to your buyer’s persona.
Myth # 5 – Content Marketing does not require strategy planning around amplification.
Your content must reach people in order to generate results. The “build it and they will come” belief will lead to a dinner party of one.
The channels for reaching your audience and buyer persona are different depends on the audience. The Amplification buckets usually fall into three categories:
1. Broadcast – This is through social media, publishing platforms, email and events. The Broadcast strategy should also include the encouragement of content sharing to expand the reach of your content.
2. 1 to 1 Outreach – Email, social media or in-person.
3. Paid Amplification – There are many ways to promote through paid amplification, such as promoted tweets and sponsor posts.
Myth # 6 – SEO does not play a role in Content Marketing
Ignore SEO at your own peril when it comes to Content Marketing. Google averages 6 billion searches per day!
Without Content Marketing it is almost impossible to earn the types of links that will confer domain authority and rankings in the search engine. As content on a site earns links it helps every other page on that domain rank better in the search engines.
At a minimum, make sure your Content Marketing plan includes Keyword Research. We recommend these articles if you want to learn more about SEO and Content Marketing.
http://sparksheet.com/5-insights-about-the-convergence-of-content-marketing-and-seo/
http://moz.com/blog/seos-dilemma-link-building-vs-content-marketing-whiteboard-friday
As you launch your Content Marketing plan, consider all the aspects that will make the plan fail. Then make the adjustments to improve the chances of success. Most important, don’t give up!
How is your Content Marketing plan going? We’d love to hear what’s working for you!
