A popular myth about content marketing is that it is simply about following trends. However content marketing is not about being a trend follower or about going viral. The backbone of content marketing is to create evergreen content or better put, content that is relevant to your organization and your audience at all points of time.
With that being said, many misconceptions or challenges can hinder content marketing strategies about evergreen content. To help you in steering in the right direction swiftly, here are some myths that you should avoid when you formulate your content strategy.
Content marketing is just for advertising
Content marketing and advertising are two completely different things. This fact is something that many organizations and business owners may not be aware of. If you want your advertising and content marketing efforts to work well while complementing each other, you need to keep them completely separate even though they have the same goal, to generate more traffic. Content marketing focuses on helping you build authority and reputation. It is all about the voice of your brand. In your content marketing strategy, you need to focus on making the two complement each other to create a robust and harmonic plan for your organization that gets you substantial results on both sides.
Creating more content is the way to go
Large companies can usually get away with producing a lot of content and one day just dropping it all off. However, small businesses do not have the human resources or the luxury to do that. Nonetheless, there are many companies, both small and large, that cannot use this strategy and generate a lot of content in one day. The idea of churning more content is not the best and the most sustainable strategy. You need to focus on your target audience. You want to ensure that you create good content that they actually want to read. If your goal and focus aren’t right, you may end up wasting the time and effort that goes into creating content in the long run.
Your company doesn’t need video content.
When it comes to evergreen content, naturally you would think of written content. However, the written content is not the only strategy that you need to be focusing on. Your goal should be to design a substantial content strategy. You need to make sure that your content strategy incorporates more video content. Just as with any other kind of content, you need to be careful when it comes to video content.
Nobody reads these days
Perhaps one of the most famous myths in this digital era is that people do not have the attention span needed to go through written content. Even though this idea is widespread, research shows that it isn’t that simple and there are still reasons that businesses, both small and big, look for content strategies to market their organizations. It is not the attention span that makes people adverse to reading, it is about what they are paying attention to. As long as the content you put out there is interesting and creative, people would find a way to pay attention. This is why creating evergreen content and content marketing focuses on what the target audience wants and likes to read.
Content will not work in your industry
When it comes to content marketing, your mind may directly go to short blogs and articles. If you are new to content marketing, you may believe that your industry does not need content marketing. However, this is nothing more than a common misconception. Instead of assuming that your industry cannot benefit from content marketing, you need to think about which kind of content will suit your sector. After all, industries such as manufacturing or even biotech and shipping are all making use of content marketing strategies. Hence, there are virtually endless opportunities for content marketing.
Content marketing is not sustainable.
This myth is like an imminent fear for people who are creating content. Many content marketers fear that they will, sooner or later, run out of content to produce after they look at what their content has already covered. However, instead of focusing on what your content already has, you need to focus on what is relevant to your target audience. There is always a lot more than you can talk about, it’s just about noticing it.
The more technical your content is, the smarter it would be.
Technical content, although relevant, can often be complicated and wordy jargon. When it comes to content, the key is adaptation. Your content needs to adapt to the industry you are in. If you are in a highly technical industry and you cater to a very technically-adept audience, technical content is right in your area of expertise. However, most people out there will not be able to understand a word you say if you are simply talking about the technicalities. Your focus needs to be on your target audience. If your target audience is not very professionally educated, you should put up easy-to-understand and approachable content.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed some evergreen content myths that have been circulating the content marketing strategy for a while. You should ensure that you avoid these misconceptions when you formulate your content strategy. Evergreen content and recognizing the content marketing strategy that works for your target audience should be on the top of your mind at all times.
Started working as a digital marketing expert, Varun Sharma is now also a well-known digital marketing speaker – a speaker on performance development, and a trusted mentor to businesses in the digital world. His keynote expositions are based on the digital marketing theories, which provide a fascinating insight into the secrets of high performance.