The Greatest Misconception in Content Marketing

You might be asking yourself, “I always hear the phrase content marketing, but what does it mean?” The Content Marketing Institute states, “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Common Myths about content marketing

• Content marketing is simple

This is one of the most common misconceptions. Sure, anyone can create content. But that doesn’t mean it’s good content or that it’ll resonate with your target audience. Content marketing aims to gain the trust and eventually the customer’s business by sharing information, and that information needs to be strategized. You can’t just upload a post or two and consider the job done. Instead, you have to develop a plan to ensure that each piece of content reaches your audience.

When is your target audience active on social media? What types of content are getting the most engagement? Knowing this is a considerable advantage, allowing you to develop a successful game plan. For example, honing in on the types of content your potential customers engage with most makes it easier to create material that gets shared and shared frequently.

• You have to use every platform

A big marketing misconception is that you need to utilize every platform. Most people don’t use every platform under the sun, and neither should your business. It’s way more challenging and less effective trying to lead people to a place they aren’t visiting regularly, so narrow your focus to the areas they do.
Maybe your customers skew younger, so TikTok makes the most sense. Are they older? Then Facebook might be the answer. Just remember that if you decide a platform isn’t working, deactivate or delete the account. You don’t want it to appear like you aren’t engaging with your audience. This can soil your brand’s online reputation and potentially drive customers to seek out other businesses.

• Results happen overnight

Patience isn’t anyone’s default setting. It’s easy to turn into Veruca Salt and expect fast results for the things you want. But the odds of your content making the internet explode, even if you’re pushing quality content, is pretty slim. The name of the game is consistency. Consistent, quality interactions over time will lead to a loyal audience. It’s normal for results to take six to nine months, or even longer, to see the fruits of your labor. But a slow-burn marketing strategy can eventually grow your business out of an audience that stays long past your 24-hour Instagram story.

• No room for new strategies

Another marketing misconception is that you should only stick to tried and true strategies. If you’re living on earth, you’ve seen how the pandemic changed what we thought we knew about marketing overnight. The Harvard Business Review recently shared an article stating how the universal truths we knew about marketing were now dust in the wind. So you have to pay attention to new and dynamic technology and adapt to the changing times. What previously resonated with your audience might now seem out of touch, and a good marketing agency knows how to keep content aligned with the current climate.
How can you be sure that what you’re sharing is working? Good ol’ fashioned trial and error. Pay close attention to the response you get from your followers, and they’ll help guide you to creating the most successful content.

• Only promoting yourself

Lastly, a massive marketing misconception we see put into practice is that businesses will only promote their goods and services. Wouldn’t you be more likely to share a post that provides a bit of wisdom or humor rather than just a traditional ad? Pique the interest of your audience about what your business focuses on in the big picture. For example, do you sell artisanal cat food? A funny reel featuring crazy kittens would be a welcome respite from the deluge of sales copy. A great tool is the 80/20 rule; 80% of your content should be entertaining and informative, while 20% helps push brand awareness and contains a call to action.

Facts You Should Know About Content Marketing

• Content marketing helps small-scale businesses as well as large-scale business

It does not only work for small-scale businesses. It works for every kind of business or corporate organization either profit-oriented or not. The large-scale business started from being small-scale and grow to become what it is presently and the small-scale will not always be a small-scale business, it will eventually grow and transform into a large-scale business.
Content marketing helps businesses and brands to rapidly grow in acquiring customers, nurturing leads, conversion, and relationships between brand owners or marketers.

• Contents are not always created by content marketers

For a small-scale business, you may not be able to afford the cost of hiring a professional content marketer, you can actually do this on your own.

This is why in our 90% practical digital marketing course, we teach you and every other person who registers, how to be a content marketer as well as other digital marketing skills and knowledge you need to digitally grow your business.

• Articles and write-ups with images are much more popular than the ones without them

People tend to relate more and be willing to read when an article has a visual display attached to it. Adding images to your articles and blog post, and also accompanying them with catchy headlines, makes your content more effective and appealing to your target audience. Images work better at catching the attention of your target audience.

• Content Marketers can use approximately 12 strategies

They are not boxed up into using a specific strategy. They have the opportunity to use whatever works well for them. A content marketer can decide to stick to visual designs or switch strategies depending on the effectiveness of a strategy.

• In content marketing, you can create multi-purpose content

Having taken your time to do research, you can convert your research into different forms of content. You can use multipurpose content in guest posts, Podcast topics, Conference talks, Support articles, and many others. The idea is that you can be as creative as you want with your content.

• Control and protect your investment

In content marketing, your investment is the content you create, so control and protect it. As much as blogging platforms such as Medium, Quora Posts, and LinkedIn Pulse are a good place to start, and of course, it allows you to start writing and reach a large audience, right away, it also has a downside too. One of the downsides is that you will have no control over them, you can’t control their existence.

They can choose to go off one day because they are moving in a different direction and then you lose access to your content or they can choose to start a premium subscription which will make it impossible for your readers to consume your content. It is safe to say that you should invest in preserving your content.

• Content marketing goes hand-in-hand with the sales funnel

A sales funnel is each step that a person has to take to become your customer. To get the best as a content marketer, your success relies on the existence of your sales funnel. Your main goal for content marketing is to take someone from knowing nothing to the point where they now know something and become your customer.

Content marketing will definitely give you the traffic you want, but the traffic alone is not relevant until they convert to leads and get converted. Creating a content marketing strategy is similar to creating a sales funnel. The steps and stages are close to being the same and their goals are the same. From identifying a target audience down to the point where they make a purchasing decision.
Creating a sales funnel is exactly like content marketing. You have to refine and tweak it until you get it just right.