Content Creation: What Not To Do

Negatives have their place, don’t you think?  Because sometimes it is just as important to know what you shouldn’t do as it is to know what you should do.  Case in point, here are five things you need to avoid like the plague when developing a content creation strategy for your marketing communications efforts.

 

1. Never consider the wants/needs of your audience.  Providing really useful information for your target audience is highly overrated.  Most of your potential buyers have a lot of time at their disposal and will read just about anything that has some relevance to their job – no matter how remote.
2. Don’t worry that your content is too promotional.  You want, above all, to inundate your audience with information on your product or service and you want your data to have no real merit beyond reinforcing your selling points.   
3. Make sure that your online content is devoid of keywords/phrases.  Why run the risk of improving your search engine rankings or driving too much traffic to your website. And, don’t analyze your website traffic to see what content your customers gravitate to and download.  They are probably not paying attention to the ‘right’ things anyway.
4. Don’t bother with either an editorial calendar or a content audit. Surely you’ll cover all aspects of your chosen topics without any planning or prompting. And, timing your submissions to important industry or company events or mapping your content to your potential customer’s buying cycle really doesn’t matter much in the scheme of things.
5. Limit your content creation to one format.  Written case studies are really sufficient; there’s really no need to videotape your customer’s thoughts for YouTube. Or, repurpose your case studies into an e-book. Or, include your case studies in White Papers. Or, create a webinar based upon this information.  Enough is enough.

All joking aside, content creation isn’t rocket science.  We all simply need to pay attention to our content marketing strategy and cover all the bases:  find out what your audience’s pain points are and speak to them.  Educate them.  Integrate your online and offline communications efforts and nurture your prospects with well-timed content that moves the ball increasingly toward a sale. Vary your content formats so you can appeal to all types of buyers.  We all have our format preferences: one potential customer’s penchant for webinars is not universal.  And, believe it or not, repurposing good content is fairly easy to do.

But perhaps you need help?