Content marketing requires dedication and patience. To weather the ups and downs of your business cycle you need to keep a steady flow of content appearing on your blog, your newsletter and your social media. There are, however, a few terrifying moments in the life of a content marketer that give us a shudder to think about:
The moment you are staring at a blank page and need to write something since no one else will.
There is nothing more terrifying than a blank page — when you want something to jump out at you and it doesn’t. It’s a black hole but there is an idea lurking around the corner. This is the moment when your training kicks in and you put your plan in motion. Executing to the plan is the way out of your predicament. You have a plan right?
The terror of consistently producing quality content is very real. A deliberate, well-thought out content marketing plan calms the nerves, takes the pressure off, and brings your team together to bring organization to what was chaos.
The day you realize your blog has not been updated in 60 days.
The content marketing horror story goes like this: You start with a plan to post every week.Your team meeting goes well and everyone is excited to see the new company blog take shape. You write your first blog entry, maybe a second but then you can’t get anyone to write the third or the fourth. The Zombies arrive and pull you in ten other directions with new marketing initiatives or maybe a new website redesign (even though it’s the third one this year).
So what happened to that blog? How do you pull it back from the dead? Your blog is withering out and you are left out in the cold, with your sales team clawing for new leads.
The day you are supposed to publish your newsletter but you have nothing to put in it.
Like a witches brew, the ingredients that go into a newsletter need to come together in a potion that drives demand. When you get the potion right, newsletters are very effective.
But like finding the eye of newt or pinch of dragon breath, getting out a newsletter regularly can be a daunting task. Each deadline seems to come faster than the next and without the right supply of content it’s hard to pull together.
When that newsletter deadline jumps out and hits you, you had better be prepared. Don’t let this fear keep you up at night.
That time you were out on vacation and no one published anything.
Just when you start to relax, a hand reaches out to grab you. As this horror story goes, before you left to sit under a palm tree you worked extra hard to prepare all of the marketing materials to be posted in your absence. You met with the team and got a few people to cover for you. But then, on day six of your ten day vacation you do a quick check of your blog and email marketing and you see nothing has happened. Suddenly your blood pressure rises and your vacation is ruined. Your content marketing has stopped in its tracks without the systems and process to keep it going.
The moment you realize no one has been seeing the content you have posted.
This is a sordid tale of an accomplished and robust content marketing plan gone bad. You embark on a journey to bolster your blog and website with great new articles that discuss industry trends and provide tips and expert advice. Each of these articles has been peer reviewed and has met with praise from the management team. You publish these blog entries regularly and marvel over a blog that provides such great value to all your readers.
And then it hits you. You have been publishing regularly according to all of the content marketing best practices and the only ones reading your content are ghosts.
How do you turn this frightful situation around?
Look to all the ghosts and goblins and witches that you have in your email list and leverage your content in a regular email newsletter to them. Create destination pages centered around themes that feature your content. The more eyeballs that see your content the more effective it will be to drive sales.
To keep these scary moments at bay, you need a strategy for creating content, publishing content and leveraging that content to drive leads and ultimately sales. We all know there is nothing scarier than a sales rep without a lead. Let ContentMX turn these content marketing nightmares into a peaceful dream.