The Many Virtues of Content Marketing And How Not To Go About It

The virtues of Content Marketing are many; from creating awareness about a brand to enhancing its perceived value in the minds of customers and from increasing the sales to searching new prospects for the business and so on and so forth.

Content Marketing starts right from the ideation point of a product or a service and continues after the product has been sold/consumed (luring in ex-customers and making them sworn to a product/service is an objective of Content Marketing), thus making it a necessary evil.  There has been a heavy surge in the number of content-based firms over the last few years and most companies reach out to boutique Content Marketing firms for their Content-based endeavors or hire an in-house Content specialist(whichever works best).

However, what most firms don’t realize that content is ethereal, it’s uniquely delicate and has to be developed and discharged with utmost care and prudence, because one wrong content marketing endeavor could prove detrimental to the business.

Having worked with a couple of content based startups, both of which escalated for a while and then went down into the abyss because of the wrong interpretation and application of the general wisdom around Content, I am qualified enough to tell you about how not to go about Content marketing.

Here are the don’t s of Content Marketing:-

1. Don’t change the content complexion too often – Every website has a different complexion as far as Content is concerned. Some have a loud and Bold Content, while others have mellow and polite Content. This complexion is often inscribed on the psyche of the readers and that is how a website stands out from the lot down the line. Too much of mixing up won’t help.

2. Don’t search for a perfect content recipe – When Content drives amass initial success, content managers start to believe on their instincts and grow stubborn for finding a Talisman which makes every content-based effort successful. They start to ignore the fact that what happens after the content is published is beyond anyone’s control and that we have to keep the reader-centric approach while developing content and not chase superficial targets of discovering “An Anatomy Of Content That Always Works” or something.

3. Don’t just sit on the shoreline and wet your feet – The content managers should never be reluctant to delve deeper into the demographics. One needs to understand their target audiences very well, to design and curate relevant content for them. So, don’t sit by the shoreline, dive into the water doing a cannonball instead.

Be it any endeavor, there are hundreds of things which needs to be executed with precision to make things work and then again, one mistake could prove to be really costly. In order to not go astray and channelize one’s content marketing effort into the right direction, one should always dig deeper into what will work with the audience.