Expectation vs. Reality in Content Marketing

Rebecca and I once filmed a segment of a special on social media. The interviewer was a fun guy and pretty unflappable till he asked how we got our ideas.

“So you have to come up with new things to say every week?”

“Three posts a day on each platform,” I said. “So it might be 45 posts a week.”

“Plus blogging,” Rebecca chimed in.

The host’s face froze. “What?” he said.

The cameras stopped and we went back and forth a little while he tried to digest the idea that we post good stuff for our clients 45 times a week. Plus blogging.

At times like these, I usually think we ought to charge more. But lots of times it’s not an interviewer who has some idea of what writing up a script for a weekly show entails. It’s clients who figure they often tweet, “Heading to Wood Stone for lunch” or “How bout them Hogs?” and it doesn’t seem to be much of an effort.

They see that we’re planning to write them an ebook a month, three blog posts a week, and three social media posts a day, and they think they can fit that in themselves. Maybe their wives could help. It just doesn’t look like that much trouble.

They’re not considering that they’re talking about some 10,000 words every month. And it’s not just typing words. There have to be ideas in there. Research. Strategic communication designed for search engines and human beings… at the same time.

Plus images, implementation, tracking, and tech stuff.
expectation-reality

Content marketing is the fastest growing marketing strategy today and many major companies agree that it has the best ROI, too. It also sounds like something you could do yourself. But you have to be realistic about your resources.

If you write 10,000 words a month, you’d have an average-length novel done in six months.

[tweet bird=”yes”] Did you write a couple of novels last year? If not, then you don’t write enough to do your own content marketing.[/tweet]

Fortunately, you don’t have to write your own. If you don’t have a writer on your staff, you’re better off hiring writers. Like us. Email me and find out how to make the reality of content marketing fit your expectations.


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