Content Marketing Secret Revealed: “Instant Gratification” Does Not Exist
How long have you been doing content marketing? For those new to this particular online marketing channel, you’re probably still on fire, checking several times a day how many people are reading that article you’ve just posted. For those of you who have been doing content marketing for at least a year now, you know that this sort of gratification just does not exist in content marketing world.
What?
Yes, as shocking as it might sound to those just starting out. It is what it is. Content marketing is a marathon .
Silver lining: you have plenty of chances to correct content materials that have already been distributed. Why? Quite simply, a content material such as an article that gets posted is permanent. It will stay online, on that website for the lifetime of the website unless someone makes the effort to take it down. If 100 people have seen the article and you spot a mistake, there’s nothing stopping you from making a fix for the next 1000s of people who might come by it for the many years to come.
I’ve been asked many times over, what’s the KPI, what’s the goal, how should conversions be measured. As someone who have live and breathe SEO and content marketing for over 7 solid years, let me share with you this secret:
Content Marketing is not about the “Goal”, it’s about the “System”. As such, Instant Gratification just does not exist and quite simply: a myth.
You might be thinking, then why invest in content marketing at all? The perfect analogy is to imagine it as interests on your savings. If you were to be able to make 1% progress a day and the value of that progress tops-up to the next 1% the following day, for every day of the year; the effect is exponential growth. By the end of what may seem like a tedious journey that calls for conscientious discipline to stick to the plan and routine, you’re well on the right path to seeing significant impact; and not just any significant impact, but one that is long lived.
Here’s another example. Say you were to contribute 1 branded article to a website a day. By the end of the year, you would have 365 branded-content on 365 channels talking about you, 730 the next year and over a 1,000 by the third year. Now if you’re a local business, this means over 1,000 local online presences talking about you. If your website does not happen to rank for a certain keyword, one of the 1,000 websites probably would. As you can see Content Marketing really is more of a system.
Now imagine you are distributing 1 article on 3 different channels, you would get 3,000 online presences talking about you by the 3rd year, not 1,000. Hence, the distribution is also part of the system to exponentially build your brand awareness and the probability to rank in search engines for a very large number of keywords. Content Marketing is in fact also like throwing a net instead of fishing one fish at a time.
Add other media to the mix such as videos and infographics, and you’ll be looking at over 6,000 online presences talking about your brand. It is this exponential effect that makes content marketing highly effective. All in all, do keep in mind, that the quality of your content should take precedence. It is what represents your brand.
But why must it be such a marathon and trying on patience? It’s the very nature and essence of what defines this marketing channel as you can see in this video by the Content Marketing Institute which shows just how long content marketing has in fact been running in the race.
