Rob Dietrich, Senior Content Manager

October 28 2019

4 Myths About Content Marketing

The oft-misunderstood world of content marketing is a living, breathing, evolving space. It’s in a constant state of flux to meet the changing demands of buyer personas and search engine algorithms. And being the moving target that it is, there are lots of misconceptions around content marketing.

Here are four myths about content marketing, and why they simply aren’t true.

1. “Content marketing is just a fancy word for advertising.”

This myth is a serial offender and lead culprit of many a failed content marketing campaign. If you approach your content marketing campaign like an ad campaign, you will fail. While ads involve (mostly cleverly concocted) sales messages and slogans, they’re allowed to be outright self-promotional because they’re appearing in a paid ad. Any editorial that you create for content marketing purposes must be of genuine informational value to its intended audience. After all, your goal is to position this content so that your readers will find it as a result of their own research. If you lead them down a tunnel to a crummy commercial, they will feel tricked and will leave your site posthaste. Hear that? That’s the sound of your bounce rate spiking.

2. “Anyone can write content.”

You wouldn’t ask your doctor to do your taxes. Ideally, let the writers write the content. Find someone adept at collecting the appropriate information and producing quality content that engages with your target audience on a meaningful level.

Are you a small company with limited resources? By all means, assign your content creation jobs to the appropriate subject matter expert. Whether it’s a product manager, engineer or someone from sales. But for the love of all that is good, make sure they know how to write well, and how to write for the web. Be sure they are writing objectively, and at a level appropriate for your intended audience. Do your research and identify the keywords people are searching on that relate to your content themes. Providing these to your writer upfront will help focus their efforts to produce the desired results.

3. “The rewards of good content marketing are instant.”

While I wish this was true, it just isn’t realistic to post a single piece of brilliant, award-winning content to your website and expect all of Google to read it the same day.

Your mantra here should be “steady does it.” Set a realistic but regular goal date of creating, posting and promoting new content. A steady stream of quality, relevant and engaging content, updated regularly, will gradually start to find its way to your targeted audience. From here, the relationship builds. Viewers become subscribers. Subscribers become leads. Leads become conversions.

4. “The only good content is long content.”

Hogwash!

While there is truth that search engines give preference to the longer forms of content, we’re not talking about War and Peace here. More important than exact word count is taking the appropriate amount of time to effectively communicate your message. Don’t drone on simply to enhance your word count. Remember that while you’re using search engines to help get your content in front of readers, your primary objective is to write for the readers themselves. Do your research, take the appropriate amount of time to formulate your story. And if you can shoot for 1000 words (or more), then more power to you.

So there you have it. With all the hype around content marketing, I hope these four myths help you realize that it isn’t exactly rocket surgery.

Have you conducted your own content marketing campaigns and have some additional myths to share? If so, or if you’d like to talk about how O’Keeffe can help with your content marketing campaigns, let us know!