4 Myths About Content Marketing, Debunked!
- Shubha Madhukar, Director & President, TIC

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Through my 20-year-long career in the content business, I've come across several myths about content marketing. Often, organisations rely on such myths to drive their content strategies and find it difficult to see the impact of content marketing on their overall marketing, communications, branding and business goals.

When listing the top myths, I zeroed down on four. I also felt the need to debunk them for you. I hope you find it helpful.

Before getting to the myths, let's take a step back and define content marketing.

Content marketing is a long-term marketing strategy. It can build a solid and lasting relationship with your stakeholders by consistently delivering high-quality and relevant content to the target audience. An essential aspect of content marketing is spotting your customer's needs across the customer journey or funnel and creating compelling content pieces to address their needs. For example, if your customer is in the "consideration" stage and is looking for providers similar to you, a persuasive case study can help the customer make a decision. And if your case study is strong enough, it may even favour you in winning the client over.

Definition done; now let's look at the myths about content marketing.

Myth #1: Content Writing is Content Marketing

For the longest time, I've heard the terms content writing and content marketing used interchangeably. That's the first myth. Many organisations think that content writing and content marketing are the same. Simply writing and publishing content is often misinterpreted as content marketing.

The Fact:

Content writing is not content marketing. Yes, content writing is a part of the entire content marketing process. But just content writing is not content marketing. Content marketing is a strategic marketing process. Like any other marketing campaign or activity, content marketing needs to consider aspects such as identifying the target audience, their content needs across the funnel, writing content, promoting content, and tracking the content performance for each channel where it is published.

As you can see, content writing or creation is an integral part of content marketing, but content writing in itself is not content marketing. Since both are different, it helps to also define KPIs for each.

For content writing, the KPIs would be content readability, relevance to the theme/topic/keyword, grammar, no plagiarism, and so on.

For content marketing, the KPIs depend on the channel in which the content asset is used. While it will be traffic growth, average time on page, and so on for websites, it would be reach and post engagement, and so on for social media.

Myth #2: Content Marketing Means Textual Content Only

The second myth is related to the first. Because content marketing is often mistaken as content writing, organisations look at textual content as the primary means of content marketing. The worst part is they start viewing content spends in terms of per word cost ("it's just writing after all," is usually the reason they give!) without paying any attention to the quality of the content. They end up hiring people or agencies that offer content writing services for as low as 50 paise per word! The result is usually tons of textual content irrelevant to audience needs, creating no impact.

The Fact:

While textual content is crucial for successful content marketing, it is necessary to have other forms of content required in your content marketing arsenal. The textual content can form 80% of the content you create. SEO is largely dependent on textual content and you must reserve it for your website and any other print collateral that is important to you. The balance 20% must comprise visual content for your social media channels, emailers, ads, events, print collateral, and so on. This is a rough estimate and differs from brand to brand and industry to industry. If you are serious about content marketing, you need to be serious about high-quality textual and visual content.

Myth #3: More the Merrier

How many content pieces do you think a brand needs to create and publish in a month? Well, for many organisations it is 'more the merrier'. Whether or not it is relevant. We often find brands posting content every single day on social media. Some are keen on commemorating special days, whether or not it has any relevance to their brand. It's like a company engaged in the construction business in India celebrating Pizza Day because everybody likes pizza.

The Fact:

The digital universe is exploding with content. Some outstanding. Some ordinary. And most, below average. Just like you choose your friends and battles wisely, make it a habit to choose your content creation target numbers wisely. Ask yourself questions ranging from what works for the industry and how the competition is doing it to what goals you want to achieve. Once you get your answers, determine the number accordingly.

Myth #4: Content Marketing is All About Company Stories & Promotions

If you analyse, you will see several companies heavily promoting company news and stories on their websites and social media channels. For them, content marketing = company promotion.

The Fact:

Most content marketing campaigns fail to yield results because they only want to talk about the company. The consumer does not care about a brand that beats its own drums (aren't there too many out there?). The customer seeks solutions, needs answers, and is hungry for knowledge.

Some brands understand the pulse of the customer, and they are the ones to ace the content marketing game.

Let me give you an example.

If you've ever Googled anything on content marketing, website design & development, and customer relationship management, one site that almost always comes up at the top of the search engine is HubSpot. And why not? HubSpot has amazingly informative and helpful content, after all. The HubSpot Blog has answers to all the critical questions that marketers and digital marketers try to find answers to.

At first glance, the HubSpot blog seems like a leading publication for the marketing fraternity - an authority in marketing, sales and customer relationship management with a whopping Domain Authority (DA) of 93 – something that only established media publications are able to achieve.

But HubSpot is not a publication. It is a cloud-based CRM software company! And it publishes content on its blog to answer questions crucial for marketing, sales, CRM and digital marketing professionals.

HubSpot is a shining example of what brands can do if they look at content marketing through the right lens and take an outside-in approach, giving precedence to their customers and not the brand. Even for a media publication, achieving a domain authority of 93 is a tall task. But a CRM software company has achieved it with its blog! That deserves a standing ovation!

Taking the content marketing journey a step ahead, HubSpot introduced the HubSpot Academy. It is now a go-to resource for anyone keen on learning different aspects of digital marketing and earning certifications. The HubSpot certification is a badge marketing professionals worldwide love to show off! That is the level of aspirational value HubSpot has created only through content marketing!!

So here is a brand that didn't brag about itself but chose to help customers with a solid content marketing strategy. And the results are for all of us to see.

Have you tried content marketing for your brand? Did you come across any myths? What were they? What are the content marketing hits and misses you experienced? Reach out to us to discuss about your content marketing needs.