If you want to invest in content marketing — and you should — then make sure you’re ready to play the long game.
Content marketing strategies often fail and for many different reasons. My colleague Mark Traphagen and I recently invited well-respected thought leader and Moz founder Rand Fishkin to join us on a live video broadcast of The Digital Marketing Excellence Show to discuss the reasons why.
What follows in today’s column is a summary of the top lessons from the show, starting with three myths.
Myth #1: The Greatest Lie Content Marketing Ever Told
The first problem people run into is the belief that, when they start with content marketing, people will immediately see their great content, visit their site, and buy their product or service (or sign up for their email lists, or start following them on social media sites). This is what Rand refers to (video) as “the greatest lie content marketing ever told.”
Worse still, since many believe that the content marketing effort is targeted toward attracting immediate customers, they will often keyword optimize the titles of blog posts on their sites. This leads to a the opposite of what was intended – the blog post (which could draw lots of links) might start outranking one of their money pages for the targeted term — and revenue goes down!
This can happen easily because blog posts are usually poor converting pages. And this is clearly not the desired outcome. Many that view content marketing this way end up trying it for a while and giving up pretty quickly.
Content Marketing: What Separates Success From Failure? [Rand Fishkin Interview]
