Your content marketing will not take off immediately: Houston we have a problem
PR or Press releases used to be the main non-advertising method of sending out a marketing message: A controlled one-way communication.
Content marketing or attraction marketing works as a two-way communication:
- You publish content for free and hope that people find it
- You hope that they will like it enough to forward, repeat or refer your content
- In the best case they might even communicate back to you and give you insights on how you can refine your content
Jep Castelijn of LeadSloth clearly explains the differences using diagrams between the Old and New situation.
If content marketing is the new PR or Press Release then some problems are apparent:
- Publishing content requires creativity as it needs to be interesting
- Not everyone is capable of writing interesting content or giving it an interesting angle
- Plagiarism: Copying and adjusting content to hide that it’s plagiarised is rather easy
- Getting found (in an organic way, without breaking the bank) is the real problem
- The copy of the original content can have a better SERP than the original
- Although written content is very good for search engines, people prefer visual content which is:
- Even harder to create
- Hard to index by search engines – thus less likely to be found
- Even if you create a lot of content somehow it needs to get found to submerge from the rest
- Content marketing requires time as it needs to brew over time
- The decay of content on search engines in time is a problem as new content is valued higher than older content
- Similar the decay of importance on book marking websites over time
- If too many content creators are in your market, there’s fierce competition to be on top
Content marketing is not the Holy Grail that will bring instant interest, gratification and success.
Content marketing requires dedication, creativity and patience.
These requirement are not feasible and accessible for all companies: not all solutions and products are interesting enough to generate content about. Not all companies have the time to wait for content to get created, indexed, found and climb up in the SERPs (if all goes well) or live with the uncertainty if the content will even attract visitors at all.
Content marketing will stay a method with limited distribution.
Thus Houston we have a problem: we can’t solely rely on content marketing as it will not take off instantly.
