Content marketing is the future.
It’s highly effective – far more effective than traditional “push” advertising. Everyone is moving to the web and content marketing is tailor made for the Internet. It can take on many different forms – from blog posts to viral videos; from email newsletters to personal websites and everything in between. It can be educational, fun, informative, inspirational and serious.
With all the love swirling around content marketing, it’s easy for small to medium sized business owners to get caught up in the passion and overlook two important things: Content marketing is neither cheap or easy.
I was flipping through a HubSpot presentation the other day and they had a chart showing content marketing in cost/lead terms and they compared it along side other marketing strategies – from direct mail to email marketing and pay per click. The cost/lead associated with content marketing made it seem like a no-brainer – something you’d be crazy not to do.
On the one hand, I agree. There’s one little problem though – it takes most normal people a tremendous amount of time to create truly remarkable content. Some people couldn’t do it with all the time in the world. Ask any web designer that works with SMB’s what the most challenging part of each project is – my guess is that it comes back to content creation – how to get the business owner to sit down long enough to create content for their new website.
Often times what happens is that the owner never gets around to it so the frustrated design firm does it for them. In the best case scenario, the content comes out as okay but no where near remarkable. Sound familiar?
Ask someone that runs a blog with a serious following how easy it is to create content that kills! If they tell you it is easy, my guess is that they are either a professional writer by trade, a thought leader in their industry (meaning anything they say – no matter how stupid or error ridden – will be followed like gospel) OR they are lying to you!
Creating amazing content takes time and is very difficult. So while there might not be a significant monetary cost to start a blog or build an email newsletter, there’s a different kind of cost – time. Ironically, that’s what most small business owners lack! Even when there is extra time, the typical SMB must consider where they get the greatest return for their time. Is it from writing a blog post — for that blog that may never take off or is it from putting processes in place to make their business more efficient?
So while I can’t recommend content marketing enough and I do believe it’s the way of the future, business owners be warned. There’s no magic formula and success takes hard work, skill, time and luck! Before you scoff at hiring a content marketing firm, think about what you’re time is worth. Think about how much time it is going to take you to create content that kills.
You can spend 30 minutes to an hour with a content marketing professional and then let them do the work or you can toil away for hours a week and still end up with a whole lotta nothing!
3 Comments
July 18, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Nice post. I’ve find this to be very true.. even at large companies.
July 31, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Ben – good chatting a few minutes ago. Re: Content Marketing… this is definitely something we’re doing much more of in 2009 than in 2007/8. Good content has value, a value that can give people a reason to come to your website, or value that you can leverage to build brand, relationships, goodwill, etc… in the SEO world, all that soft fuzzy marketing stuff can lead to inbound links
July 31, 2009 at 7:30 pm
John, Thanks again for the time! Next time you’re in Maryland, drop me a line – I’d love to put a face with a name. Ben