Common Myths of Content Marketing

Chris Risner

C ontent marketing is growing in popularity as an essential strategy for driving traffic and generating leads. It is also a great way to promote your brand and establish meaningful relationships with your potential customers.

As more businesses begin to design content marketing strategies, it is important for them to be aware of common myths and misconceptions that surround content marketing. This article will highlight some of those myths and why they stand not to be true.

It Won’t Work for Your Audience

A common misconception of content marketing is that it won’t work for the type of audience that you appeal to. This is however not the case. In fact, 70% of consumers prefer to relate with a brand through their content (such as articles, videos and blogs) as opposed to being blasted with ads that are trying to get them to buy something.

Consumers want to feel a connection with your brand and to develop a relationship with it. Once you have built up that trust with your audience, they feel more comfortable purchasing your products. This situation holds true across many different audiences.

It is Too Expensive

Many companies feel that a content marketing strategy is out of their reach financially. When you look at it more closely, however, traditional methods of advertising can be much more expensive.

It is indeed true that content marketing comes at a cost (such as creating the right content, hiring writers and paying for social media ads) but these costs, when properly incurred, are actually less burdensome than other marketing strategies. This is particularly true for many advertising marketing plans such as Google and Linkedin.

It Comes At No Cost

Another common misconception is that content marketing is a cheap way to get the job done. Some businesses think that by simply putting out content, the rest will work itself out and they will automatically drive traffic to their site. This is however not true.

Businesses need to invest in the right strategies in order to create attractive and relevant content for their customers and drive those customers to their website. Such strategies involve paid social media advertising in order to give your content a boost, developing content around keywords through SEO in order to drive traffic, and re-designing your website in order to have the right landing pages. In fact, effective B2B marketers spend 39% of their budget on content marketing. It is the right channel to invest in.

It is Difficult to Measure ROI

The ROI on your content marketing strategy can be measured. You can track incoming traffic and where it is originating from, and the number of leads that you have generated through the response rate to your call to action posts on your website.

You can also measure how many “contact us” forms have been filled out or how many people have subscribed to your newsletters in order to determine how many leads you have generated. Content marketing provides many methods through which you can continuously track and measure your results.

Quantity is Better than Quality

You would think that the more content you put up, the better. However sacrificing quality for quantity can have the opposite effect on your content marketing strategy. Customers want more of what is relevant to them, not just more.

It is better to have one blog post that reaches many more people than multiple posts that are read by fewer people. When beginning your content marketing strategy, start slow, focus on quality and have a plan that outlines the goals of each piece of content you put up.

Results Come Quickly

Many businesses new to content marketing always expect quick and easy results as soon as they put up their material. Content marketing takes time and a lot of trial and error. It requires a deep understanding of your audience and the ability to create content that they find attractive and relevant.

In addition, you have to promote this content to your customers. All this takes both time and effort and it should be an on-going process, not an overnight activity.

All Content Should be on Your Website

It comes naturally that businesses would want all the content they have worked so hard to create, to be on their website. There are however advantages to diversifying where your content is located online.

Republishing your content on other platforms helps increase outreach and draw traffic to the originator of the material. Other platforms also probably have a larger audience than you may have at the moment, therefore it helps your business when you attempt to put your content on these larger brands.

The More Views, the More Success

Just because your video or blog post has been shared thousands of times does not mean that it will automatically drive traffic and generate leads. While outreach is an important first step towards successful content marketing, it is important to turn that outreach into leads for nurturing.

Your content should contain a call to action and other drivers of traffic that enables you to grab the attention of more potential customers.

It is Difficult to Compete with Other Businesses

Smaller companies or those that are new to content marketing may feel intimidated by larger established corporations which have a lot of web traffic and are dominant online. It is, however, possible to be competitive. If you strive to be unique and valuable in the content that you create, you can stand out in the face of all the material that is out there.

Implement SEO strategies that use keywords that are unique, yet popular in how often they are searched. As potential customers search online for solutions to their problems, having unique and valuable content that is SEO optimized can draw them to your site.

Content Will Speak for Itself

Sometimes content marketers create quality content and think everyone will want to read it. Quality content is not enough for effective marketing. This is because every minute there are a thousand tweets, a thousand videos uploaded on YouTube and a thousand photos shared on Facebook among other sites. Marketers need to work hard so that their content will stand out in a sea of information overload. They need content that is different and unique. Content marketers need to find what their customers want and give it to them effectively than their competitors. A business needs to consider factors like online traffic, page views, engagement and number of clicks. They also need to use customers’ feedback to analyze how well they are serving the customers’ needs. Once they have this data, they can come up with strategies that will better target their customer base.

Content Marketing Won’t Work in a Specific Business

A common myth is that content marketing belongs to some industries rather than others but this doesn’t mean that content marketing won’t work for them. Shipping companies are using content marketing to raise brand awareness. Research shows that content marketing will work effectively in the least likely industries.

Social Media isn’t an Effective Way of Content Marketing

Businesses need to be active on social media and use it as an actual publishing platform. They can build better relationships with their clients by encouraging them to follow their social media sites and interacting with them. Too many brands neglect social media maybe because they believe their customers aren’t tech-savvy or active on these sites. Almost everyone is on social media in this age of technology and failing to use it as a resource could be crippling to the business. Social media shouldn’t be ignored as a unique marketing channel. It provides multiple channels on which content can be distributed i.e. YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr. A strategy needs to be defined in order to determine how efficiently social media will be used to enhance a company’s brand and maximize user experience. The better the content the more readily it will be received by customers.

Creating Content is an Easy Process

Creating content marketing with no experience is not easy. A number of processes can be used including; using social aggregators to schedule social media posts, tailoring newsletters and emails to promote content and using analytics to predict customer behavior towards the content. However, automation should not be used completely as the end result will be impersonal and not connect with the customers. Content creation should not be automated. There are software companies that can use to streamline the process of content marketing. Businesses’ need to know that creating efficient content marketing strategies is going to require a lot of investment in time and resources so they will need to hire professionals or dedicate the time to create the content themselves.

It is Easy to Find Great Writers

Companies that are focusing on expanding the blog section of their websites and other text-heavy areas may opt to go for cheaper writers and other low-cost solutions when generating content. Simply writing something for a blog post and generating top-tier content are two different things.

Companies should invest in obtaining quality writers that are knowledgeable of the subject matter, the target audience, and can relate to the overall marketing strategy of the business. Creating professional content that your customers’ value is an important skill that should be given the necessary attention and resources.

There are Better Marketing Strategies

Content marketing is increasingly becoming one of the top marketing strategies being adopted by businesses. In fact, 72% of marketing professionals believe that branded content is more valuable than ads placed in magazines. Many of them also view content marketing as superior to direct mail and other traditional marketing strategies.

Typical ads that “interrupt” and are placed in between TV programs, magazines and other media outlets are increasingly becoming less effective at generating sales. Content marketing is more effective marketing strategy and, when done properly, will continue to provide benefits for the foreseeable future.

If our team can help you harness your content into a streamlined content and CMS strategy, please contact us.

Top Signs that It is Time for a New Web Content Management System

Chris Risner

I n the modern day, a successful enterprise relies heavily on the flow of digital media. A responsive and high-quality website makes a great first impression on potential customers. Likewise, company employees rely on systems to get relevant data as quickly as possible. An efficient content management system (CMS) is able to juggle both of these realms in order to keep a company running at its best.

Content management systems index and store all of a company’s data so that it can be quickly and easily retrieved by the people who have access to it. An effective CMS is capable of enterprise content management (ECM) as well as web content management (WCM). ECM is primarily concerned with the flow of data between members of a company. WCM on the other hand focuses on the flow of data between an enterprise and potential customers. Both forms of content management need to be as efficient as possible in order for an enterprise to be successful.

However, like all software, sometime a content management system simply needs to be replaced. But how does an enterprise know when it needs to purchase a new content management system?

It All Comes Down to Time

The needs of an enterprise change very rapidly. That is not to say that a new CMS should be purchased every time the needs of the enterprise shift. It does, however, mean that an enterprise needs to keep a watchful eye on their content management system for signs of a degrading service.

When considering to replace a content management system an enterprise should be asking the following questions:

  • How much has the enterprise grown since the CMS was first installed?
  • How does the enterprise needs to present itself to potential customers?
  • Are there any significant flaws in how the current CMS is operating?
  • Does the current CMS update frequently?

Growth of the Enterprise

The most simple answer for whether or not a company should invest in a new CMS is: Yes. Over time, any successful enterprise will outgrow the systems that worked for it in the beginning. This is because when an enterprise first starts out, it most likely invests in an affordable (i.e cheap) content management system. At this lower level, a cheap content management system fits the need of the enterprise just fine because it has a very low workload. However, as the company grows this cheap CMS can be strained by the sheer amount of data it has to manage.

Naturally, the larger a company grows, the more content it has to archive: transactions, payrolls, et cetera. This content is vital to the operation of the company. If the enterprise grows very rapidly, so too will this backlog of information. If there is too much content for the current CMS to operate it may no longer work as well as it used to.

All of this data inevitably piles up. As an enterprise grows it continuously needs larger and more powerful systems to keep it all in check. Record keeping is crucial to the health of an enterprise – one never knows when a year-old payroll may be needed. As such, this kind of data can not simply be deleted to make room for new data. 

Changing a CMS may be more hassle than deleting old data, however in the long run it becomes an impractical and temporary solution. Eventually an enterprise has to upgrade its content management system if it wants to continue to grow. The sooner an enterprise can make the switch, the better off it will be in the long run.

Perception of the Enterprise

The most simple answer for whether or not a company should invest in a new CMS is: Yes. Over time, any successful enterprise will outgrow the systems that worked for it in the beginning. This is because when an enterprise first starts out, it most likely invests in an affordable (i.e cheap) content management system. At this lower level, a cheap content management system fits the need of the enterprise just fine because it has a very low workload. However, as the company grows this cheap CMS can be strained by the sheer amount of data it has to manage.

Naturally, the larger a company grows, the more content it has to archive: transactions, payrolls, et cetera. This content is vital to the operation of the company. If the enterprise grows very rapidly, so too will this backlog of information. If there is too much content for the current CMS to operate it may no longer work as well as it used to.

All of this data inevitably piles up. As an enterprise grows it continuously needs larger and more powerful systems to keep it all in check. Record keeping is crucial to the health of an enterprise – one never knows when a year-old payroll may be needed. As such, this kind of data can not simply be deleted to make room for new data. 

Changing a CMS may be more hassle than deleting old data, however in the long run it becomes an impractical and temporary solution. Eventually an enterprise has to upgrade its content management system if it wants to continue to grow. The sooner an enterprise can make the switch, the better off it will be in the long run.

Functionality of the CMS

A major sign that a content management system needs replacing is if employees or customers report persistent issues while trying to access the content that the system manages. If content is frequently unavailable or if there is considerable lag while trying to access it then the CMS is likely due for an upgrade. 

On the consumer side, longer wait times or frequent errors may be a result of a CMS that is desperately in need a replacement. If too many customers are complaining about long wait times they may decide to take their business elsewhere. So investing in a stronger CMS is a move that not only keeps customers happy – but it keeps the enterprise healthy.

On an employee’s end, a faulty content management system may often lose content or it may take too long for content to be retrieved. The slower the content management system operates, the slower the employee works. To keep employees working at their most efficient an updated CMS is key.

Updates for the CMS

Like all software, a content management system can be updated to improve its functionality. If the developers of the CMS are not updating it, odds are the content management system will become rapidly outdated. Content management is a rapidly changing environment and if updates are nowhere to be found an enterprise could be lagging behind.

Updating the CMS is always a preferable step to purchasing a brand new system. It will save money and hassle that come with changing the content management system altogether. However, if an update does not improve the functionality of the CMS or if  there simply is no update then it is time to start looking for a new system.

If our team can help you with your CMS, WCM or DXP, please connect with us.

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