One content marketing mistake many commit but nobody talks about

Everybody’s doing content and social media marketing these days, and there are a huge amount of resources available on both. But all this advice clearly isn’t working, especially in the Indian startup industry. Too many startups are mindlessly rehashing content from other sources and there is far too much confusion among young entrepreneurs about the most important aspect of social media, i.e, engagement.

There are basic mistakes startups are making when it comes to content and engagement, mistakes that render all that advice irrelevant. Mistakes that have been lost somewhere amidst the mountains and mountains of tips and techniques and buzzwords.

The mistake, in one word, is that of personnel. They’re simply hiring the wrong people.

This is the first of a two part series where I talk about the basic hiring mistakes we are making in content and social media marketing (especially in India)

Is there a problem with content?

As someone who spends a lot of time reading on the internet, I’ve always felt that the average blog post is unimaginative, stale, poorly written and in some cases, full of grammatical mistakes. But don’t take my word for it.

Doug Kessler from Velocity Partners spoke about this in his infamous “Crap: The content marketing deluge” presentation that went viral on the internet two years ago.

Then there was this question at inbound.org, that famous community of inbound marketers.

To be fair, the article from which this image has been sourced also mentions how only 30% of e-commerce founders were using “content marketing”. But no killer blogs out of the 30% is still a really bad number

The Challenges for good content

As Doug Kessler wrote in that presentation, the deluge of crap, or poor content, is drowning out the good articles. Well-established names have no problem standing out, but it’s the upcoming ones that are facing a problem jostling for our attention amidst all that noise.

Compounding the problem is that the resources available that have taught everybody how to dress up their content in order to catch our attention. Everybody has got the style, and that’s making it even more difficult for the ones with substance to stand out. Worse, the prevalence of all this has meant that readers are acquiring a distrust, which translates to another obstacle that upcoming blogs must overcome.

Reader Fatigue

Just like the effectiveness of telephone and email marketing began to reduce when everybody joined in the bandwagon, we’re seeing the same trend with content marketing, and indeed, social media marketing as well because of reader fatigue.

Bhuwan Wadha also claims in this article about he talks about how “Many readers including myself, end up blocking even the content developed by real thought leaders — as we want to avoid the content garbage.”

So what about the personnel?

As already mentioned, we’re simply hiring the wrong people.

There are two simple qualities that form the bedrock of content marketing:-

a) A certain amount of knowledge in the related field, or/and a voracious appetite for learning new things.

b) Basic Writing Skills. While there’s no space for Shakespeares in this field, one certainly needs an above average affinity with the language.

Knowledge has two sources- a) Experience b) Sustained reading on the subject over a period of time. With enough of it, it can even compensate for a lack of writing skills, as this article superbly demonstrates (although the author is being too modest)

Now, knowledge, certainly the amount required to write an article, with some degree of originality in a world where almost everything has already been harped on repeatedly, isn’t likely to be cheap. Experience is certainly valuable, as is an appetite for learning. And anyone who has consistently spent his free time reading on a subject like entrepreneurship is likely to be a self-motivated, curious individual, qualities that usually take you far.

And we haven’t even taken into account basic writing skills yet.

So I think it’s safe to say that you’re looking for a fairly skilled/ experienced person if you really want your content marketing to pay dividends amidst the challenges mentioned above. In fact, you’re probably looking for both.

Yet, there’s a notion running around, especially in the Indian Startup Industry, that content is a cheap service.

Quality costs money

The median salary of a content writer in India is Rs 2,20,000 or about $3500 annually. That’s incredibly low even by Indian standards, and do we really think anybody with the qualities mentioned above would work consistently at such a fee?

Bhuwan Wadha writes in the above mentioned article that “a few executives who hired college interns to write articles on their behalf and churned these articles on a weekly basis — and then claimed themselves to be thought leaders. Once you start reading some of this content — it is anything but thought leadership.”

Seriously, you’re looking for thought leadership. Think about what that word really means.

Shopify, one of the poster boys of content marketing, also made a similar point in this article when he spoke about ecommerce blogs “There is no sense of emotion, or style, or character, or… anything. There are just words on the page — take it or leave it — and that’s it.”

Do we really think emotion or style or character, combined with knowledge comes for that price?

The Believers

a) “I’ve seen it work most effectively when there is someone on the team who is a good writer and can just own the blog and drive it,” said Lars Lofgren, growth manager at KISSmetrics “If a team wants to build a content strategy but can’t write and depends solely on contractors, usually the quality is subpar.”

PS- KISSmetrics’ blog was receiving 500,000 monthly visitors last August.

b) Shopify has a well known blog with some great content that was instrumental in bringing it the initial traffic that made it the household name it is today. Their CEO Tobias Lütke was a popular blogger and they’ve had Mark Hayes, a former journalist, working for them since 2006.

Here’s an example of a great blog post by Mark that has been shared over 1000 times. Remember, that’s where the bar has been set, and if anything, it’s now higher.

c) Unbouce has laid great stress on content writing from the beginning, by having the only marketing employee on their team focus a great deal on their blog. It’s a major reason for their rapid growth

Conclusion

In the latest season of House of Cards, Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) hires a best-selling novelist to sell a story to the public. Although, the plan eventually backfired, Underwood realized that not everybody can write a good story, that’s it’s a rare gift. Rare things usually don’t come cheap.

My intention isn't to write a piece lamenting the sorry state of my brethren. No, instead, it’s urge you take a look at your content, and if you find that it isn't ‘generating enough leads’, remember, it’s all about the money, honey