11 Content Marketing Worst Practices

This post originally appeared on Mumbrella.asia

Luckily for Click2View content marketing is flavour of the month right now and with good reason, it’s a highly effective way for brands to engage audiences at a deeper level than advertising and enables them to build their own audiences which can save serious media bucks. However, content marketing is still in its infancy and despite all the best-practice examples out there we see the same mistakes being made time and again so, instead of writing about what you should do we though we’d write about what you shouldn’t do, that way you can at least avoid getting it wrong which is half-way to getting it right!

1. Don’t just create content because you can; create it because you have identified a business need and have a strategy to fulfil that need with content.

2. Don’t just brief in the asset, brief in the outcome because the best way to achieve your goals is to let your agencies and partners know about them too.

3. Don’t under-brief. Cutting corners before you’ve even begun is guaranteed to result in bad content.

4. Don’t hire a journo then treat him or her like a copywriter. Let them dig for stories that you wouldn’t otherwise know existed in your organisation and tell them with candour.

5. Don’t assume because someone has the kit, they also have the talent and experience; I’ve got a pen, but that doesn’t make me Shakespeare!

6. Don’t just talk about yourself, you may live and breathe breakfast cereals, soft-drinks or semiconductors but your customers don’t so find out what they care about and how your brand relates.

7. Don’t just copy, innovate! The world doesn’t need anymore makeup tips videos, you need to do better. (And here’s a tip, it’s not about the makeup…)

8. Don’t jump on any old bandwagon. There has to be some relevance to your brand and some sensitivity to the story.

9. Don’t post and pray, rarely does “viral” just happen. Have a distribution plan and a budget – think about it, you wouldn’t create an ad and then just hope people found it would you?

10. Don’t forget to measure, analyse and adapt your content regularly because to ASSUME makes an ASS out of U and ME!

11. Finally, don’t expect every piece of content to be a success. Publishers, broadcasters, record labels, movie studios and game developers have been in the content game for decades and still they get it wrong more often that they get it right. Learn from your mistakes and move on. Rome wasn’t built in a day.