If you do effective content marketing, the reward will come. Its successes are well-reported: you’ll generate more revenue and grow your business — all the while your customers will like and trust you more. It’s not a new strategy, but it’s one that’s taken off with the age of the informed buyer.
Content marketing takes a different approach to traditional advertising. Instead of pitching to your customers, you make them smarter with educational content that helps build long-term relationships. On average, 76 percent of shoppers feel closer and more positive about a company after reading custom content.
Unfortunately, there’s a misconception about content marketing that it’s cheap and easy — in reality, it’s a big investment and it isn’t for everybody.
Here are the top seven reasons you should not do content marketing.
1. You want to be ‘on-trend.’
Every decision about content marketing needs to make sense for your business. Otherwise, your content won’t be valuable to your customers. If you don’t have a justification beyond “it’s hot right now” or “my competitors are doing it,” you’re not going to create anything new or useful — and a fresh perspective is at the heart of effective content marketing.
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Following a trend without a purpose is a dangerous path, which will lead to meaningless, useless content.
2. You need a quick fix.
Content marketing is a solution that takes months — even years — of dedication to be effective. You need to give away value before you can expect anything in return. That’s why it can take a while to get your content marketing program off the ground.
A lot of companies give up when they don’t see immediate results. Most blogs get abandoned within the first few months, even though the long-term payoff of blogging is huge. For example, brands that create 15 blog posts per month average 1,200 new leads per…