How businesses waste money on content marketing

Stacey MacNaught, from content marketing agency Tecmark, explains why so many companies are burning money when it comes to digital outreach

Content marketing is nothing new. Jell-o and Michelin were both engaging in content marketing in the early 20th century. In 1904 Jell-o created small recipe books and distributed them to housewives door
to door, while in the 1940s, Michelin promoted its tyres by producing a guide to hotels and restaurants around France for French motorists.

Both companies achieved marketing-led goals through the use of content. And that is essentially what content marketing remains over 100 years later – a means of achieving marketing goals, whether directly or indirectly, through the use of content.

One thing that has changed is the way content is consumed. The internet, smartphones and faster connections means audiences are constantly connected and constantly consuming content. Digital content is an increasingly competitive space and this is, in part, down to the way in which search engine optimisation (SEO) has changed.

As Google’s algorithm has made it more difficult for businesses to achieve SEO success using the old-fashioned, link-building methods, more have turned to creative content as a means of driving inbound links, something that’s illustrated by the Google Trends graph.

This has led to a surge in investment in content marketing. But there are some bad habits in content marketing which result in businesses wasting their money, and here are a few of them.

1. Failing to set measurable goals
It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing you should be doing content marketing simply because your competitors are. But setting out on any project without measurable objectives in place first is setting yourself up for failure.

Objectives could be to build inbound links (SEO-led objectives) or perhaps to drive social traffic and interaction. A content project may be designed to increase the conversion rate of existing customers or to open your brand up to a new audience. Whatever it is you want to achieve, the starting point is making sure you record it and determine how you’ll measure the success of it.

2. Format-first content marketing
Unless you’ve been totally disconnected from modern society for the past few years, you’ve won’t have missed the popularity of ‘infographics’. Suddenly it seemed that thousands of businesses and SEO agencies decided that the way to build links and win SEO success was by turning blog posts into infographic-based pictures.

The infographic was traditionally a clever data visualisation technique that enabled viewers to quickly digest a lot of complex information. That’s exactly what a good infographic is – data visualisation. But the reality is now that there are thousands upon thousands of pieces of content being dubbed ‘infographics’, that are, in reality, just words and pictures.

And in many cases, these infographics aren’t actually presenting particularly compelling information at all. There are some excellent infographics out there. But it’s a space saturated by poor quality and these poor quality infographics are a laughing stock.

Even the Guardian (which, incidentally, produces some amazing data visualisation work) got on board with a mocking, ‘Is this the worst ever infographic?’.

The infographic has become a joke and one of the reasons this has happened is because people and businesses have looked at infographics as a link-building tactic. It’s not. It’s a content format. And not all data or content should be presented in that format.

The format should never be first. The most important thing is the story you’re telling. Get that right first and the format comes after.

3. Not spending enough time on ideation
“Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it’s the only one you have,” said French philosopher Émile Chartier, and it rings so true in content marketing. Ideation is often overlooked. Many businesses are happy to invest days or weeks in producing content, visual assets or videos. They’re happy to spend huge sums of money producing the content itself but might only spend a couple of hours on the ideas stage.

The success of any piece of content depends wholly on the idea upon which it is based. At Tecmark, one of the biggest challenges we faced going into the content marketing space was the need for a large volume of consistently strong ideas.

We’ve taken to using a German-devised method of creating ideas – 635 Brainwriting – for the initial stage. This method, when carried out with a team of six, produces 108 ideas in 30 minutes. We then go through a process of shortlisting the strongest ideas and developing these. By having more than 100 ideas, you can easily spot the strongest and the weakest when pitted against one another.

The whole ideation stage for us involves six people and can take days.

4. Not going multiscreen
A flashy piece of content on a desktop is one thing. But if it doesn’t work on mobile and tablets as well, you are going to cut out a huge segment of your audience. This is particularly the case if your content is intended to bait social media interaction.

For example, Ladbrokes produced an infographic for the Cheltenham Festival that was a piece of content with a clear social intent – a social call to action at the top of the Cheltenham Festival webpage.

But with the vast majority of Twitter and Facebook users accessing the Ladbrokes website on mobile devices, this should have been taken into consideration. And unfortunately, with this infographic, the content hadn’t been repurposed specifically for small screens.

That was a massive missed opportunity and it could have been a costly one.

5. Not investing in promotion
Unless you have the luxury of a social audience as large and as engaged as Paddy Power’s, your content is unlikely to gain traction on its own. In a content landscape as saturated as sports betting, even phenomenal quality content isn’t going to simply launch and win. And even if you do have a large social
audience, it doesn’t mean your content will gain traction.

Going back to the Ladbrokes Cheltenham Festival piece, despite the operator’s 345,000 Facebook fans, sharetally.co.uk reports that this piece of content performed poorly on social.

It was a great-looking piece of content on a desktop and it presented a lot of information clearly. But it failed to perform on social despite the format lending itself so well to social.

A business needs to allow, in its content marketing budget, for promotion. This can include manual outreach to relevant influencers or audiences and paid promotion through social channels or content discovery platforms like Zemanta, Outbrain and Taboola.

There’s no single recipe for success with content marketing, but setting goals, understanding your audience, making sure your content is based on a solid idea and investing in promotion will help to minimise the risk of expensive failure.