By Zach Basner

The promise of inbound marketing is a lure that attracts businesses of all kinds, but few understand the efforts it takes to be successful. After a few blog posts, they flame out and grumble “We tried content marketing, but it didn’t really work for us.” I hear this from prospective clients all the time.

And I get it. Business owners are skeptical of making an investment that might not pan out, so they get cautious and are ready to pull the plug at the first sign that they’re wasting money.

Honestly, they probably are wasting money. There’s an epidemic of half-hearted content marketing out there that’s giving the whole inbound philosophy a bad name.

So when I hear potential clients say that they tried content marketing but didn’t see results, this is how I respond.

Why Your Content Marketing Efforts Might Be Missing the Mark

Content marketing is not new. The ideas have been around for decades. At this point, no business professional is unfamiliar with a blog, search engine traffic, or social media.

The problem, it seems to me, is that too many people have misunderstood the true purpose of content marketing — and so have missed the mark on their past efforts.

Go to most companies’ blogs and you’ll find fluffy, self-serving content: Pictures from their clean-up day at the local park, press release-style articles about promotions and employee-of-the-month winners.

Or, it’s filled with content that feels derivative and identical to a thousand other articles on the internet.

It is no surprise to me that this kind of content has failed to bring in customers.

Unremarkable Effort, Unremarkable Results

With most things in life, your results match your efforts. As the saying goes, “You get out of it what you put into it.” Same thing here.

When companies tell me about their forays into content marketing in the past, I’m not surprised it didn’t work for them.

“We tried content marketing…”

If you’re one of those businesses that “tried” content marketing, only to see sub-par results — I’ll bet you got out of it what you put into it.

This happens for a few all too common reasons, and I’ve seen dozens of companies fail because of these same few mistakes.

1. There was no clear owner of your content marketing. If content marketing is something that gets tacked onto other responsibilities, it’s going to fall by the wayside. You can’t ask someone who already has a full-time job to also produce and implement a full content marketing strategy. That in itself is a full-time job. Heck, it might be more than a full-time job.

2. You played it safe. To me, content marketing is about educating your customer. It’s about building trust and being transparent so that your potential buyers can access the information they need to become customers. This means you need to address thorny subjects. This means you have to offer honesty instead of a sales pitch. When we …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron