Content is king. Just make good content. Great content marketing is the future of marketing. How many times have you heard each of these phrases over the course of the last few years? Many brands, from Chipotle to Whole Foods to Gatorade have taken content marketing to heart and are producing some truly inspired content. But many other brands haven’t taken the plunge and many others have tried to make good content and fallen flat on their faces. So what’s keeping brands from making great content? Here are a few things that keep brands from making the best content possible:
Roadblocks to Making the Best Content
Focusing on Sales
Your fans and potential fans don’t want to hear your sales pitch. They may not even want to hear about your products. They want content that entertains, inspires, and teaches them. They want content that makes their lives better. You might have the best products and services in the world but your content marketing is not necessarily the best places to put your sales materials.
Trying to Make Content “The Easy Way”
Just throw up a picture of a cat with a funny caption. Get the intern to do it. Can’t we just outsource that? The correct answers to these statements are Don’t. Don’t. And no you can’t. If you want to succeed in content marketing you HAVE to invest time, money, and manpower into it. Hire content marketers who know what they’re doing and give them the resources to be successful. If you aren’t willing to do this, content marketing might not be for you.
Making Content That Has Nothing to Do With Your Brand
It is absolutely essential that your content is connected to your brand. It makes sense for a dog food company to post cute puppy pictures to their Facebook feed but maybe not a company that makes aluminum tubing.
Making Content No One Cares About
This kind of goes along with “focusing on sales” but if you make content that’s important to your brand but not important to your fans, no one is going to look at it. Content needs to be interesting, or useful to real people or it’s going to get buried in an avalanche of Buzzfeed quizzes and inspirational quote memes.
Buy In
It’s impossible to make good content if you don’t have buy in from the powers that be. Convincing c-level execs to let you make content that does the things it needs to do to be successful can be a real challenge. You need to point to examples of successful campaigns and explain how you can make content for your brand that can emulate that sort of success. If you can overcome this challenge, the others can be conquered much more easily.
And remember- when it comes to content, make it good first, then make it shareable.
