The 7 Deadly Sins Of Content Marketing

You. Marketer. You've been very bad.

Let me list of all the deadly sins you are guilty of...

SLOTH

No content strategy and no content measurement

Your content marketing efforts failed because you were too lazy to build a strategy. No clear goals, no clear focus on creative, no clear results. You were a sloth!

You should have put your strategy to paper. Make it your foundation on everything you create and measure over the next two years? Where was your documented content strategy, exactly?

And why didn't you set up your tools to measure the results properly? You should have set up your Google Analytics, built a lead scoring process, used an attribution model and tied all your marketing channels to your CRM. But you didn't. And this is why your campaigns were doomed to fail even before you hit the publish button. Only a sloth doesn't connect the pipes before turning the water on.

LUST

Content that's more in love with you, than your audience

You treated your content marketing like it was advertising. Do you not know the difference? Advertising is content built around what you want to talk about; content marketing is content built around what the audience wants to talk about. Hint: it's usually not your products.

Your content didn't help them, or entertain them, or challenged them or informed them. All your content did was sell to them. Because that's what you wanted the content to do. You know that whitepaper you built that's really nothing but a product brochure behind a soft paywall? Yeah, that's not a whitepaper. And that 'thought leadership' video that only talks about the new features of your product? Not 'thought leadership'. None of what you did made the audience fall in love with you.

Lust is great, but only when you lust after your audience. I wanted you to build a community, to listen to them, to contribute to their conversations or start new ones that inspired them. But you chose to interrupt their conversations with a pop-up on your latest price drop. Shame. You should have listened to David Beebe when he said: "Content Marketing is like a first date. If all you do is talk about yourself, there won't be a second date."

Footnote: There is a time and place for both tactics in your marketing and you should do both, just not in the same piece of content.

ENVY

Content that lacks a point of difference... because you copied it from others who did it first (and probably better)

You were jealous. You looked on in envy at your competitors pioneering content and thought, we should do that! And you did.... exactly the same... but worse. You missed your chance. Your audience already had that piece of content they wanted and it was your competitors because they were first and did it better.

You should have shaken off the green monster. You should have embraced your brand's individuality. Showcased your point of difference and leveraged content marketing to sing it to the world! You should have run your own race and focused on delivering unique value to your audience. That's what you should have done, then your competitors would have looked on at you with envy.

GLUTTONY

Too much content, not enough customers

Do you know the term "Content Shock"? It was coined by Mark Schaefer way back in 2014. It is what happens when there is too much content about a topic and not enough audience inventory to read it.

We had too much content in 2014. It's now 2019.

And yet, you still looked at the latest Blockchain trend and thought audiences needed another blog post from you about it. Did they? A simple Google search would have told you that Blockchain has enough content. How would your blog post be better than the 254 million other posts about that topic in Search?

You got greedy and jumped on the latest buzzword and keyword targeting trends. You contributed to the gluttony of content. You contributed to Content Shock. Audiences want more substance than the another vanilla piece containing no more value than everything else they've already read on the topic. Sometimes it's prudent to create better content, rather than more content. Create intuitively so that your audience consumes intelligently.

(Yes, I am aware of the irony of writing another 7 Deadly Sins of Content Marketing post, but mine is intuitively written and you are an intelligent consumer!)

PRIDE

Content without a distribution strategy

Surely you know the Paretto Principal? Twenty percent of your efforts will result in eighty percent of your wins. But that's not how you thought about content, is it? Your pride got in the way. You thought all of your content would "go viral" and you questioned the value of content marketing when it didn't. You really believed that your audience would fall in such love with your content that they would share it on their own social feeds, tell everyone they knew about it and buy everything you had to sell. When they didn't, your pride was hurt.

The truth is, it didn't matter how good your content was because nobody actually saw it. Nobody saw it because you didn't have a distribution strategy. To quote Jonathan Perelman, VP of Agency Strategy at probably the world's best virality factory, Buzzfeed: "If Content is king, then Distribution is queen - and she wears the pants."

In other words, one's pride makes them think they will 'go viral' without a paid investment in digital marketing distribution. One could argue that distribution is more important today than the creative. And that was your deadly sin. You did not realise that today's digital world is 'pay-to-play'. How much of your budget should go to distribution? It depends but LinkedIn has recommended a split of 60/40. Sixty percent on distribution and forty percent on creative.

GREED

All content is expected to be a last-click, conversion driver

Perhaps your biggest sin of all is greed. Your insatiable demand for immediate leads and an instantaneous return-on-investment from your content marketing. You gobbled up the vanity metrics and you guzzled down the clicks. But still you demanded more! More leads! More ROI!

In your greed you tried to force a square peg into a round hole, all to satisfy your need for a dollar return. You failed to approach content marketing with the mindset that most content should not have the goal to drive leads. And your biggest mistake was that you didn't consider the difference between an audience's 'informational intent' and 'transactional intent' online. You didn't consider that perhaps all your audience wanted from your content was the content itself; and not a call from your sales house. After all, if you knew the audience intent was that they wanted information, why would you expect a transaction to be the right goal?

In your greed you tried to force a square peg into a round hole all to satisfy your need for a dollar return.

Only a fraction of people consuming your content will ever have transactional intent because people don't go to blog posts to buy. They use blogs to research, to be influenced, to be convinced. Why were you so greedy? Did you not heed all the advice that content is a slow burn that generates accumulative value over time? If so, why did you carry the expectation on immediate results? What evidence did you use to hold that view? Or was it just greed?

Moreover, you could have used content marketing as a crux to support other lower funnel advertising and demand gen channels and tactics, but no. Not you. With you, every piece of marketing collateral needed to drive leads. And that was your downfall. You never stopped to think that there is nothing wrong with content simply giving your audience the information they need without asking for something in return. You were greedy. You always wanted to consumer to pay. You forgot that sometimes content should just be great content.

WRATH

Content marketers who fear their community

You scared, bro? Yeah, you were scared. You were scared of negative feedback from your audience. That is what held you back from being a great content marketer for your brand. You feared their wrath. You shut out their voice and acted like their opinions didn't matter. But as a marketer, you knew it was your job to survey, interview and explore a customer's passion and pain-points. You were supposed to know everything about them. But you didn't do that. Instead, you hid from them and made assumptions about what they cared about. What were you scared of? Their responses may not always be positive but they will always be valuable.

You also failed to use content marketing as a research tool. Oh yes, one of the biggest long-term advantages of content marketing is its ability to attract 'subscribers' to your brand for you to research. In fact, I believe 'subscribers' is the most important metric for success for any content marketing campaign because once you have a database of subscribers/followers, you have a database ripe for customer research.

Did you ever consider that your database was more than just a list of people to pitch products and services? You should have thought smarter. You could have used your email list (and followers on social media) to discover what is important to them about your content and brand. It would have made your marketing better and you a better marketer. But you were afraid of wrath. You were more worried about the number of followers you accumulated than the feedback and wisdom they could impart if only you asked them questions.... If only.

But now it's too late.

You've sinned too many times.

And rather than blaming your own vices on misaligned expectations and poor tactics, you blamed it all on that 'fad' content marketing...