Content marketing is not going away so marketers in technology companies might want to pull a plan together to ensure they are communicating with their audience in a more relevant manner. In today’s tight economy ( although, it looks like it is getting better), budgets remain tight and limit the big message blasting available to most organizations. Content marketing is a viable alternative to reach your buyers in media that they consume and rely on for their information.
But, it is not easy. Developing consistent and relevant content relies on listening, analyzing and creating valuable information. Most organizations have a hard time setting up the structure to actually stick to the plan. To ensure you can successfully set up a methodology in your marketing department dedicated to content marketing avoid some of the common pitfalls listed below:
- Your company is set up to sell products or services, not to provide relevant and valuable information to customers and prospects. It takes a real mindset change to start thinking about your customers’ informational needs as part of your marketing strategy.
- You have well-worn marketing paths that are easy to follow. Going off the beaten path into uncharted territory is intimidating.
- You have strong relationships with media partners that may go back decades. It’s not easy to break those relationships by pursuing a brand-new content marketing strategy.
- The reduced effectiveness of traditional marketing may have occurred so slowly that no alarm bells have gone off within your organization. You also may think things will come back at some point.
- Many companies (possibly yours) aren’t measuring their marketing, so you may not even be sure what is and what is not effective. Hard to make any changes when you don’t know.
- You lack both the right people and the right processes to implement a new kind of marketing.
- You are reluctant to abandon traditional marketing tactics for what they may believe to be unproven content marketing or new media practices.
- You lack content marketing role models from whom they can learn best practices.
- You place very little value in marketing versus other aspects of the organization (operations, product development). Little do you know, that every part of the organization is affected by (or actually is) marketing.
- Even though I’d hate to think this one is true, I’ve seen it first hand…You have some real incompetent persons running marketing for your company that don’t have a clue about the needs of your customers or what to do about it. Before you can even look at content marketing, you have to ditch them.
