Content Marketing – Top 4 Items to Consider

It has been heard time and time again, “Deliver valuable content to your readers” “Master the art of storytelling” “Build relationships with your customers and they will be loyal for life.” Seth Godin, one of the finest marketing minds of our time, said “Content marketing is the only marketing left.”

The tips, tricks and best know-how’s have been drilled into our heads so much that the fairytale dream of having our content go viral has the very scary outcome of failure.

The best advice out there is the hard reality of the content marketing world. If you are considering launching content marketing initiatives, ask yourself the following four questions first:

1. How frequently will I publish?

Many bloggers are under the misconception that writing a single blog post here and there is sufficient enough to push their blog to the top of Google rankings. Or the even more frightening thought of “if I build it they will come.”  Those people might as well hang a big neon “Closed” sign on their front page.  

To have an impact you usually need to create 16+ articles per month, if not a lot more.  Hubspot recently pulled the data of 13,500 customers and found that a direct correlation in the amount of posts per month and the amount of traffic. Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that published between 0 – 4 monthly posts.

2. How is the content to be created?

There are really only two choices here for you to consider: Create the content yourself (either you personally, or someone in house) or hire someone else to create the content.

If you are considering writing the content yourself because no one knows your business as well as you do, keep the following in mind:

• Creating content takes dedication – both time and effort need to be poured into the task.
• Your writing skills might not be up to par – consider hiring an editor to both proof and critique your first few posts.

If you are assigning content copywriting to an internal staff, or a freelancer, or an agency, there is a rule to know: “A piece of content is only as good as the person who wrote it.”

Hiring an intern to write articles for you will only get you an intern level content.  Hiring a freelance content writer might cost you $100 to $300 per post, but this often comes with a good amount of research and time spent on each article. While hiring an experienced expert or even agency could cost you $15k to $30k.  

3.  What is your promotion strategy?

This goes back to my previous point.  You are wrong, dead wrong, if you think that if you simply build (write) your blog they (consumers, readers, your audience)  will come.  In fact, most content marketers believe that organic visibility is no longer a viable promotion strategy.  Even the best content needs paid promotion to fire.

If you are keeping a tally in your head, you can add promotion costs to that list. Taboola, Outbrain, Facebook promoted posts and Google Adwords all cost money to drive those desperately wanted eyes to your content.

4. How will track your investment?

Isn’t the common goal of any marketing strategy revenue? I know many bloggers speak of other goals such as pageviews, time-on-site, likes, shares, downloads and form submissions, but the end of all ends is their ROI.

If you are a small time hero that watches sales come in each day like a hawk, ROI’s might very well give you a serious headache.  They are often hard or elusive to measure directly.  It’s better to go into with a clear end goal in mind, knowing that it might not have an instant impact like other marketing avenues.

In closing, this post wasn’t writing to scare anyone off of the idea of content marketing. Actually the exact opposite. It was written in an effort to have you start your journey with a clear idea of the road ahead of you.

Yes, content marketing can be costly.  However, with a little effort it could pay off big in the long run.  Just keep your head on straight, out of the money filled clouds and move forward with increased knowledge as your friend.

How are you planning on attacking a content marketing strategy of your own? Or have you already started? We would love to hear all about your adventures in the comments below.