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19 Common Myths About Content Marketing You Should Stop Believing

The online marketing landscape is an ever-changing sphere. Here are 19 common myths about content marketing that you should stop believing now!

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#1 Content Marketing And Sales

A common myth I've encountered in my marketing career is that content marketing is useless because it doesn't drive sales. Fortunately, that isn't true at all. Content marketing can serve a purpose in every section of the marketing funnel, including sales. Of course, not every piece of content will drive sales, but that doesn't make them useless. Content marketing can also be used to bolster your sales team with things like new leads and contact information for those leads.

Ultimately, content marketing is a great way to positively impact your business and bottom-line. If you have a conversion you want to pursue, content marketing can help make it happen.

Contributors: Jessica Cain from Responsify

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#2 80/20 Rule

One thing 10 years in content marketing has taught me is that great content doesn't automatically cut through all the noise on its own. You have to amplify it.

Neil Patel says to use the 80/20 rule, use 80% of your time amplifying content and 20% creating it. You can think of it like the jet stream. There are powerful winds that planes take advantage of, but they have to reach them first. You need to pump your content up to a certain level where momentum can take over.

Contributors: Daniel Codella from Wrike

#3 Creation vs. Distribution

Content marketing is equally creation and distribution. Your article can be amazing; well written, data-driven, and fascinating to read, but if no one knows about it - it doesn’t exist. When you are creating content, you must focus both on the organic discoverability and the ways your content will be shared. The technical aspects of the content will have a tremendous effect in its discoverability. Using the right keywords, HTML headings, structuring your piece, and don’t forget to add alt descriptions to your pictures is as important as choosing the right topic.

Contributors: Lotem Hayun from Pramp

#4 Build it, They Will Come

The biggest myth I've seen around content marketing is that if you build it, they will come. People think that if you write a blog post, it will magically get viewership and traffic. FALSE. You must remember that outreach, SEO, and paid promotion is what makes your content marketing valuable.

Contributors: Devin Stagg from Pupford

#6 You Need A Blog

There's a lot of channels you can chose to create content, it could be Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. An example is Nash Daily. He choose Facebook and lots of people told him to chose Youtube. At the end of the day he has a big following, lots of exposure and has built a business around it.

Contributors: Jesus Meca from Real Focus Marketing

#8 Content Creation

You don't have to intentionally create the content that you use in your content marketing. Recently, a video of a 12 year old cutting a lawn went viral when his customer's neighbors called the cops on him. In under a week he was covered in the Washington Post, New York Times, and countless other papers, and a GoFundMe campaign to support his business, Mr. Reggie's Lawn Cutting Service, raised over $45,000.While these results are pretty dramatic, content that comes from your customers and even casual observers of your business can have an extra degree of credibility. Don't forget that you can always promote that content in your own marketing channels.

Contributors: Joe Goldstein from Contractor Calls

#9 Quantity Matters

Quantity matters, but it's not the only thing that matters. You may draw someone to your content through the use of savvy SEO manipulation, but if the content is crap, people won't stay on your site and they won't come back.  Secondly, quality matters to Google. If the content is perceived as poor, Google won't index it correctly. In other words, your stuff won't make the first page in the search.

Contributors: Carol Rose from marketing worx

#11 Anyone Can Create Content

There's a lot of misconception regarding the role of strategic content creators. It's not uncommon for business owners to falsely assume that any decent writer is capable of creating the high quality content their site needs, or that as long as they have something up on their blog they check the content box. Creating content is much more involved than that! It involves several rounds of research, planning, careful crafting, and promotion to truly make a difference for your business. Safe yourself the headache and disappointment and hire a professional to assist you!

Contributors: Alison Haselden from CanIRank

#12 Doesn’t Require Strategic Planning

The biggest myth, in my mind, around content marketing is that it doesn’t require strategic planning, but can be assigned to junior team members without direction. So many times I have watched founders, executives, and marketers delegate content without seriously considering its purpose and how that purpose will be achieved. Exceptional content requires significant thought and planning, and should be designed around a core strategic purpose, bringing in tactical keyword strategies, cross-link opportunities, and partnerships, among other things.

Often content marketing is executed in a single channel - email, Instagram, on site - as though one’s audience lives entirely there. Strong content should be designed with efficiency in mind, enabling small adjustments to make the content both appropriate and tactically useful within each channel.

Contributors: Jacquelyn Cyr from JC+CO

#13 Spun Article Content

Posting spun article content to several article directories with long-tail keyword phrases used as anchor text links back to your website will help your website to rank in Google.

This approach no longer works and can trigger Google penalties.

Contributors: V. Michael Santoro from Vaetas

#14 Long-tail Keyword Phrase

Create quality content focused on SEO optimizing for a specific long-tail keyword phrase per article. Google is looking for topical content that contains keywords associated with a deep knowledge of the topic. These keywords can include niche specific and synonyms and need to be written in natural contextual sentences and paragraphs.

Contributors: V. Michael Santoro from Vaetas

#15 Relevant Content

Content marketing mistakes can be the difference between getting traction and viewers to your website, to wasting time and money on SEO content creation. There are a few things that many organizations have found works when looking to convert. First of all the content needs to be relevant to your audience and be engaging and compelling. It also needs to have a call to action.

Contributors: Tyler Riddell from eSUB Construction

#16 Content Marketing Doesn’t Work For B2B

I've heard 'content marketing doesn't work for B2B' more often than I cancount these days. It's simply not true. Many business owners are constantly looking for articles and blogs that will enhance their understanding of an industry or sector. By producing quality content on your blog about your industry or service, you're educating future clients not only on the topic but proving your credibility as a thought leader. This helps put you top ofmind when these visitors are looking for a service similar to yours.

Contributors: Harrison Doan from Zenhaven

#17 Content Marketing Is The Most Important Marketing You Can Do

Content marketing is an important facet of marketing, but that’s just it, it’s only one facet. It’s true that your content will lead to people finding out what you’re all about and the services you provide etc. With that said you want to increase your traffic any way you can and content marketing is just catching one sector of the marketplace.

Contributors: Nate Masterson from Maple Holistics

#18 Using Buzzwords Is A Good Idea

Wrong! One of the biggest misconceptions about content marketing (and especially in the tech-oriented industries) is that by using buzzwords you attract people’s attention. The fact of the matter is that people are tired of words like: revolutionary, decentralized, democratized, cutting edge… People want to know what your product does and why is it different than other similar products. Plain and simple.

Contributors: Michael Pearl from Finance Magnates

#19 Content Marketing Requires Hiring Specialists

Wrong! Often times, the best content marketer is the person closest to the matter – hence, you and your employees. Once you ask a person to write about what he’s doing in his day-to-day life, you can get much more genuine and authentic text than anything produced by a professional content writer. If you want to run a basic content marketing project, your employees – along with some guidance – can be great content writers.

ContributorsMichael Pearl from Finance Magnates

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Written by Ben Skute

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