Impulse Creative
Content marketing has grown in popularity over the past several years, and the term is thrown around a lot in inbound marketing. After all, content is a driving force in inbound, and your inbound marketing strategy is nothing without remarkable content.
Even as content marketing becomes more popular, there are still a number of misconceptions out there about what it is and how it can work for your business. Here are five of the biggest content marketing myths and the truth behind them.
Content marketing doesn't take a lot of time
Probably the biggest myth out there is that content marketing is easy and doesn't take a lot of time. After all, all you need to do is find someone else's article and share it on your own blog, right?
Stop right there.
That's plagiarism. (The only exception is if you have permission to use someone else's content and if you give them credit). Creating remarkable content is more than just finding and using other peoples' content. Content marketing involves creating a strategy, creating content that falls into that strategy, promoting your content, and measuring analytics – all of which takes a significant amount of time.
It's quality or quantity – you can't have both
This is a popular mindset among marketers. You may think that your content must focus on one or the other. The truth is, a remarkable content marketing strategy focuses on both quality and quantity, but you may place a higher priority on one over the other depending on your business or industry. For example, an IT company may place a higher priority on creating content that's top-notch, and they may post less often because of it. On the other hand, a retail store may create simpler, more fun content that they can post more frequently. Neither is right or wrong, and it's a matter of finding what works best for your industry.
Longer content is always better
There's a lot of research out there that shows that longer posts receive more shares. It's easy to think that the only way to create shareable and memorable content is to create long, text-heavy blog posts. But then there are sites like Upworthy and Buzzfeed that show us longer content isn't always better. Both sites get millions of visitors every month, and their posts are shared like crazy online. Why? Because that's what their audience wants.
You don't necessarily need to write long, text-heavy blog posts – especially if you're writing for a younger, consumer-based audience. However, if you're writing for businesses, it may be better to write longer posts that help you build trust and thought leadership. When creating content for your brand, always keep your audience in mind.
If you write it, they will come
This isn't the movies, and creating content is only the first step in the content marketing process. Unless you have a solid group of blog subscribers that read every single one of your blogs, you'll have to let people know that your content exists. This includes posting your content on social media, sharing via email, and re-purposing your content.
Content has a short lifespan
Many marketers think that after they post a piece of content on their blog and share it a few times, it's game over, and there's nothing more that can be done with it. When you're planning your content creation strategy, it's also important that you have a plan for repurposing it. For example, if you notice that you have several posts about SEO, you could use those posts to create an eBook on that topic. There are a number of different ways you can repurpose your content, but the key point to remember is that a piece of content has a longer lifespan that you may think.
There are a number of different misconceptions out there when it comes to content marketing, but by debunking the five above, we hope that you have a better idea of what content marketing is and what it isn't.
