Virily Editor
We have often been let down by advertisements and commercials claiming something but failing to deliver anything close. It may not be hard to relate, watching a burger on a banner of some ad and feeling the water running in your mouth. But often, when you reach out for it, you feel the excitement shrink at the sight of a burger that does not even resemble the one that was shown.
Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to face the same level of disappointment with content marketing. Things can often get non-relatable and stale, and in order to get back on track, you may need to employ a full-fledged strategy. A fresher perspective is perhaps one of the ideal ways to redirect your approach and make things happen once again.
Let us explore some of the common expectations which content marketing offers and how the reality can be a bit different.
Exploring the Difference Between Expectations and Reality In Content Marketing
Expectation: It is easy to structure newsletters and mailers. It can be done on the same lines every week.
Reality: While content marketing warrants being regular but do you realize how stale it becomes? Your regularity might peak to a point where you may start losing your subscribers only because your emails are beginning to look a lot like spam! One of the important features of content is that it must never look like a mass-produced output.
If your content is, unfortunately, coming out to appear something like that, then your long term growth will be hugely impacted. Climbing the search ranks is still important, but you cannot do that with content that lacks well-researched facts and keywords. The mere absence of these features means that you are going to lose out on subscribers. You can check this guide to stop making these mistakes.
Look at content marketing as a way to build your brand. It is an opportunity to put out the word that people can trust you and come to you for a solution. It is the same idea that you would ideally use for video marketing strategy for growth.
Expectation: It is not a time-consuming process, and I can do it at any hour of the day.
Reality: Like every other thing, even content marketing needs a schedule if you are aiming to reach some goals. The moment you start taking a shortcut with your content, the quality is going to deteriorate, and the results will not be rewarding. Great content takes time to build.
What most individuals and companies fail to realize is that content marketing is a full-time commitment that requires coordination among people, collection of resources, and a strict check over the output. It involves everything between curating an idea, designing the content, choosing the pastel color to go with the content, and actually putting it up.
Expectation: It is easy to just copy-paste content across every social media platform
Reality: Sorry to hurt your expectations on this front, but if you think that a video for Facebook is going to fit well with your audience on Instagram, then you are under an illusion that can be shattered only by the numbers that show your decreasing audience.
People are on Facebook for one reason but for an altogether different one on Instagram. If you want to target that audience, you will have to churn out content that appeals to their taste on each particular platform. If you want to make your presence known to your audience on any platform, you are going to have to tailor your content to their preference.
Expectation: More content means more audience and conversions
Reality: Perhaps. But if more content is coming at the cost of quality, you are going to take a hard hit with your audience. Instead of going for more posts, how about optimizing one each day for quality and enrich it with the tools that make it go down well with your audience?
Expectation: I need to add only a few attractive lines in my content, and my audience is going to swoon over my posts and share with everyone.
Reality: While it is a good idea to hope that your content becomes the talk of the town, it is important to understand that things like this do not happen overnight. If you use a specific set of words to attract your audience, there is a big chance that they are going to connect the dots each time you make a post.
At one point, they may even realize that you are following a pattern, and it is only going to bore them. You should instead aim to make your content meaningful and useful for your audience. Anything that is thought-provoking or insightful is bound to go down well with your audience. You can check this guide to know how audiences are attracted to your brand colors.
Expectation: Good content marketing is all about good content and posting it on any digital platform for exposure
Reality: Well, while this one loosely outlines the concept of content marketing, it is, in fact, a tighter idea that warrants the use of tactics and strategies which should aim to create fantastic content that is meaningful.
Also, it is a good idea to pick up a niche and draft your content along the lines of the same so that your audience can connect you to that niche. Often, when content creators seek to harvest content from multiple domains, they end up becoming vague in the vision of their audience.
Conversions do not happen overnight and are a function of hard work and a drive to reach results.
To Conclude
Content marketing is a big wide world, often fraught with misguidance and doubts about its essence. Even though there are many expectations about the truth behind content marketing, the points above hopefully throw some light on the reality behind them.
So, there is no denying that good content marketing comes with efforts and research about the best practices related to it. When you do ace your content marketing skills, results will come in plenty!
