Are you aware of content marketing myths?
Content marketing is a tactic for creating and distributing quality content that is both engaging and useful for your potential customers. Effective content will drive traffic to your brand website, create an opportunity for you to capture leads, and generate sales.
However, this simple definition of content marketing is riddled with several misconceptions due to differing views, outdated strategies, and sheer ignorance to the latest trends. We’re listing down the common content marketing myths which must be debunked as the content marketing industry advances day by day.
Myth #1: Content Marketing is All About Publishing Blog Posts
Content marketing is a vast field involving various steps like content creation, strategy development, promotion, distribution, sharing, and SEO. So, confining content marketing to just a mere blog post publication would be an injustice. No doubt, it is necessary to update your blog regularly but every phase of content marketing has its own role to play for your business’ scalability.
Myth #2: Marketing is Not as Important as Content Creation
After writing some excellent high-quality blog posts and uploaded them on your website, you’re not yet quite done. The next step in content creation is marketing wherein you need your blog posts to reach your target audience.
With optimization, the right tools, and a sharing platform, you can expose your content to more users to boost your traffic and create your brand awareness. This makes marketing just as important as writing your content.
Myth #3: Content Marketing is Only for Text Blogs
In this ever digitalizing world, content marketing has gone on to various means including videos, infographics, ebooks, webinars and even flash animations. They ensure better user interaction and engagement than traditional text-oriented presentation.
Plus, switching to media and visual-based contents give you an opportunity to show your creativity. Therefore, it is important to strengthen your visual media marketing campaign to get a competitive edge.
Myth #4: Guest Posting is Dead
If you think guest posting is not relevant anymore, you need to think again. This is nothing but an uproar created by Matt Cutts in 2014, for which he made explanation later:
“I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there.”
Guest posting has always been an effective content marketing strategy and will continue to be so. There are many websites which rely on guest post content, apart from their in-house resources.
Guest post is still beneficial for driving traffic, creating backlinks and building your subscribers base. Therefore, crying “guest posting is dead” sounds like Chicken Little announcing that the sky is falling. However, low quality and spammy guest posting attracts penalty and is not acceptable.
Myth #5: Your Website Needs Heap of Blog Posts for Better Results
Blog posts are important for your content marketing strategy, but only if they are of high quality and follow the Google’s norms. Sadly, most marketers don’t take content quality seriously and load up their site with tons of ordinary and “crap” content, thereby attracting Google penalties.
Instead, focus on writing good and useful content first. Once you get familiar with that process, you can churn out plethora of content. Again, without quality, they would be nothing but crap.
See Also: How Online Blogging Is Influencing Business Trends
Myth #6: Content Marketing is Meant for Search Engines Only
People come first before anything else! If a search engine’s satisfaction matters more to you than human beings, you won’t go far or leave your mark. Even Google wants you to create content for the people rather than satisfying the algorithms.
In other words, if you fail to give compelling and humane content, your audience will soon turn off—not a good sign for your campaign. Therefore, keep your target audience and their needs in your mind, rather than following the search engine rules blindly.
Myth #7: Content Marketing is Easy and Quick, Anyone Can Do It
Content marketing sounds easy because of its technical (or mechanical) aspects like content creation and uploading. But actually, content marketing is only successful when you win over your readers’ trust, just like in other form of marketing.
First of all, they know your brand, and like it if it sounds interesting. If they find your services/brand really useful, they can be your loyal customer. And it takes a lifetime to build that trust and a moment’s negligence to destroy.
So, content marketing is actually a lifetime campaign with no particular date to reap the rewards.
Myth #8: More Likes, Sharing and Comments Means Successful Campaigning
Generally, the success or health of a campaign is determined by the likes and comments it has on social media outlets. This is because they are certifiable, logical and quantitative. However, they can’t be the true performance measurement of your product. There is no benefit of those likes and comments if you fail to convert them into your customers.
According to a study conducted by SocialSamosa, only 1% of users who like a business page will visit that brand’s Facebook page. Let’s understand it better with this example by kissmetrics.com in this context:
“Pretend that you acquire 1000 new likes to your business Facebook page! Once you sit down after your happy dance, you wait for the conversions to start rolling in, and revenue to start ramping up.
What do those 1,000 new likers do? 990 of them don’t do anything. Ten of them visit your page. And what do they do on your page? Maybe click around a little bit. Then what? Is it worth it?”
So there are some common content marketing myths that you need to stop believing. All you need is to know your audience and create content and strategies accordingly for a successful content marketing campaign so that you can easily boost up your website conversion rate. It’s not exactly rocket science but it will take all your skills and ability to hit the bull’s eye.
See Also: The 5 Internet Marketing Trends That Will Dominate in 2017