Although every business or brand can benefit from productive content marketing, there are some times when you shouldn’t even bother, explains Joe Pulizzi over on the Junta42 blog. He shares seven problems for brands that often result in ineffective or even useless content marketing.
Instead of producing custom content just for the sake of having it, knowing these common pitfalls could be key in refining your content marketing strategy. He shares seven, but here are the three we found most useful:
- Your content doesn’t meet the needs of the customer. As Joe puts it, “If you are a chip company, why are you aggregating pictures of babies and puppies? Why are you spending time and resources on content marketing that will have no hope of generating more revenue or cost savings in some way?” The goal is to enhance your relationship with the customer, and providing relevant information that actually helps them is the best way to do this.
- You’re producing content that’s just like your competitors’. The reason you create custom content is to make your company stand out from the competition. If a customer can get the same information elsewhere, what’s stopping them?
- Your content suffers through lack of expertise and resources. If you’re going to do it, it only pays off when it’s done well. Pulizzi recommends doing what you can do well internally while outsourcing at least a portion of the content marketing.
