I feel the need to repeat that. Content marketing will not work miracles for your brand. It’s true. It won’t unless you have the resources and the team to execute a well thought-out strategy. 

In my experience, all else fails. 

Mind that today, strategy goes beyond ‘editorial calendar planning’. 

You may start a company/brand blog and get lucky with select articles for low-volume keywords but I think that’s as far as you’ll be able to go. 

Gaining traction and actually getting content marketing to be the driving force behind bringing in traffic and clients – this, this is of the gods. And it’s not accessible to all. 

I’ll bring up just three reasons based on my experience for why this is so and what you can do if you’re still determined to have a content marketing department to help you gain some traction and bring in the results you want. 

3 reasons why content marketing can’t work miracles

For the sake of this article, we’ll mostly refer to blogs when talking about content marketing. Just because it’s the first evident place everyone looks to to ‘boost’ their marketing efforts. If you ask me, content marketing is much too complex to be summed up as so, but let me present my case.

1. It’s a long-term investment

There is no immediate action you can take to start producing excellent content that brings in the traffic. Especially if we’re talking big numbers! 

Let’s work with the premise that you do have an excellent team and your content is impeccable. It still takes months (that’s right – months) for you to see any significant returns. And time is of course money.

Content marketing is like a very slow and old engine, you have to really insist to get it to work. You also have to be patient and you can’t hand it over to the mechanic to fix it for you. 

For this reason, you can’t expect miracles or immediate returns on your investment. It all takes time, and pressuring professionals won’t help either. It is the nature of search engines and unfortunately, your competitors are already way ahead. Beating them is going to take something revolutionary. 

But there’s hope here. Stay with me!

2. Stakeholders change too often

If we talk about real businesses and step away from theory for a second, I haven’t seen content marketing perform miracles for smaller brands. It’s a saturated market. 

When you have a small team, it’s also true that stakeholders change too often. There’s always the lack of stakeholders responsible for decision making (from copy quality, to visuals, to layout and formatting, nevermind the TOV and general aesthetics). 

There are many decision making points when it comes to content marketing. And here things get tricky, because you realize you need quite the team to execute something more worthwhile. You cannot do it alone, face it. But I think many also don’t grasp that it takes a small (but somehow pretty big) team to make content marketing a well-oiled machine that works for your business. 

It’s hard as it is to find the right professionals. But once you find excellent ones, stick to them and keep them at all costs. 

3. Never enough emphasis on quality, documentation, communication

Imagine you plop into a new team and you’re told to ‘do your thing’. Bring in the traffic! Write amazing articles! Show results! And you have no knowledge of what’s been done before, how it was done, and who was responsible for what. 

Many brands lack a few basics – documentation is one of them. By this I mean documenting your content marketing initiatives, day to day work, stakeholders, TOV, and all the other things that would help onboard new members. 

Another lost aspect is the quality of the content some produce. Even those hired may not be the best judges of quality content. I’ve had countless examples where excellent professionals simply produced shit because they did not know better, and there was no one to train them/show them how things should be done. 

Lastly, communication between the content team, the rest of marketing, and the wider company can often be far from ideal. But having this channel of clear communication is essential for a content strategy that works for every aspect of your business. 

3 things you can do to make content marketing work for you

Does this mean you shouldn’t invest in content marketing at all? Not really. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m trying to make it a point that you have to prioritize quality content and you have to have a content strategist with a very solid vision (that is also documented). 

1. Start small, aim small

Don’t spread yourself thin with too many initiatives – don’t be tempted by blog articles, guest blogging, seeding, etc. This is a big mountain to climb and if you spread yourself too thin, you’ll achieve close to nothing with very little impact but having wasted valuable time. 

I’ve seen some of the best blogs boast about their SEO accomplishments. And that’s great, but having optimized articles, and milking your content for the sake of appearing on page 1 of Google is a dead end. 

If you’re really after the traffic – start small with low volume keywords and work your way up after you’ve created a content ecosystem that is interlinked (by topic, relevance, etc). 

The times I’ve seen the best results from my work in content marketing teams, is when we actually mapped out all our articles to see how they help ups build our niche. We then had a scope of work before us with content gaps we could easily fill to also better interlink our content and keep readers in the loop of the blog. 

2. Find your niche and stick to it

I do not mean the subject niche. 

What I mean here is that you have to find what you’re unique at and leverage that to find your niche in the busy and crowded online space.

Does that mean getting rid of the notion of a ‘blog’ and bidding on a different kind of publication? Yes. I do not want to influence you with my ideas but times are changing. Company blogs can no longer be the dumping space for all your content – product updates, interviews, random articles, projects, etc. It is not a waste basket. 

If you follow this strategy and make your blog ‘everything’ hoping that people come back again and again to visit, you’re actually doing the opposite. You’re blurring your area of speciality and in the end do more harm than good if your aim is to show up on Google’s radar instead of bringing in a loyal following. 

3. Invest in great professionals

Remember I said there’s hope? For the ‘blog’ side of things there is the hope of doing such amazing work that you raise brand awareness and help with word of mouth (which you’d be surprised, will bring in the clients more so than your ‘we’re on page 1 of Google’ stuff). 

As for the second part of being hopeful – invest into great professionals. People that know what they’re talking about, people that come with a vision, with a long-term plan (not just the short-term plan and fleeting ideas!). 

I think the best specialists in content marketing are the ones that study everything there is about your business and bring great ideas on the table for long-term solutions. They have a kind of vision that is sharp, strategic, and original. Sometimes they are radical ideas – and that’s a good thing! Shake things up a bit. Dare to be different. 

Today it’s hard to run a company blog. Everyone has a company blog. But they all fall in the same trap of lost hopes and broken aspirations. For example, no one thinks about building communities around their publications. That always baffled me. But more on that some other time… 

Final thoughts on killing off your blog

Did I catch you off guard? Yeah, kill off your company blog. Turn it on its side and create a publication that you are proud of. Hire the best professionals – writers, designers, editors, strategists – and just let them do their thing. 

If you’re out to do it on your own…why not just use social media? You’re better off leveraging your personal voice there. 

But if you are convinced you need content marketing and the professionals you hire are good, they’ll tell you exactly what I’m telling you here: “Content marketing will not work miracles for your brand, but let us offer you a different solution…”