Unless your content is in the top 10% of all content currently being produced, you may as well not bother.
In fact you may as well invest your money in cupcakes and give your copywriters a rest.
Which will mean you will have happy copywriters and wont have shoveled more mediocre web content online, for people to ignore.
Do you ever wonder why your stuff doesn’t get any social signals, when not even your own staff, whose very jobs depend on your success, ignore your content?
It’s very simple, and you don’t even have to hire me as a content strategist for me to give the benefit of my years of experience.
It’s because your content is mediocre.
Your content isn’t crap, because crap does get a reaction.
It’s just that it’s beige, bland, boring, something that few people in their right mind would even think of sharing with their friends. It’s not sexy content.
The thing is, your agency isn’t going to tell you because you pay them for the production and they don’t hae the skill set to be a kickass publisher of attention attracting content.
Your copywriter is not going to tell you. They are too worried that the 504th line of their epic poem they are writing about Ernest Hemmingway’s beard to worry too much about your misunderstanding of content marketing.
You do content, because you are told that is what you should do. You hear it at conferences, on blogs, from smooth talking salesmen from the local SEO content marketing agency.
But it’s not what you should be investing in.
Because good content comes from good culture.
What I mean by culture is you have to have an interesting story and be prepared to tell it. You have to be transparent about who you are. You can’t hide any more, people like to buy from people they like, they want to associate with people they aspire to be.
This age has changed from the an information age, because information is flowing as freely as the screams of joy from a Tennessee whore house (too much?).
It is now the age of culture.
Do you have the right culture?
What are you kidding me? You’re a human being, you can chose your culture, your brand, the way people feel emotionally about your business.
See it from the perspective of someone who does not know your business. Why should they care, what is it about you are your website that makes them excited, that connects with them on an emotional level.
Discover the essence of why someone would care about your business and there you have the secret formula.
Now, most of you wont get this and that’s fine. Connecting the dots in this new age of content shock, you will realise that content marketing is not a sustainable strategy and there needs to be a little secret sauce added to get things moving.
That secret is one of culture, some call it branding but I think it’s way more than that. It’s also about relationships and how you are as a human being.
This is a bit of a rambling blog post I know, and not honed and edited to maximise the readers experience. But this is written in one pass, because that’s my culture. It’s where the good stuff is. It may not even make sense to most, as someone said of my last post. “I need a sub-editor”, and that is true, but don’t let that get in the way of the message I am sending out here.
We are currently in a massive crisis in the content marketing world, except most don’t believe it or don’t want to believe it.
To summerise:
Make the best content you can that elbows its way into the top 10%
Build a culture within your business and content that resonates on an emotional level with your customer base.
