Beware all marketing promises of “cheap and easy.” Is what you’re selling cheap and easy? Probably not. Those two words are a warning sign. Cheap and easy are typically a lie.
Here’s the second hard truth about content marketing: it’s expensive and difficult to do right.
But if you do it right, it is extremely effective and has long-lasting benefits. That makes it a good value.
Why is it expensive? Because writing really good content about your product or service, your industry, the problems that your customers and prospects face, and the details of your business takes lots of time. If you want to have effective content, that will probably mean professional writers, editing, and publication workflows.
It’s work. Work is neither cheap nor easy.
But do the work and what do you get? Recognition from your potential customers as a real expert in your area. That’s something beyond price. Publish great content frequently AND have others link to it and you’ll find that the great and powerful Google* will take notice and rank you highly, far higher than you can buy your way to with advertising.
Yes, you can build a completely internal content marketing program run by your non-marketing staff. You can have them plan and write all of the content and have other staff members edit and publish the work. That’s also expensive and difficult. And it’s likely that you’ll find that you can’t sustain this. If you want to do content marketing right you’ll need to either hire professional staff or contract it out (this is the type of work that I do for my customers). Either way, there’s an expense and it’s work.
Don’t shy away from the work. You do other difficult and expensive things in your business. Why should content marketing be any different?
More on content marketing.
*I’ve found that Google is the only search engine that matters from a business marketing perspective. Check your own web logs if you don’t believe me. Bing produces under 1% of the traffic to this site and Yahoo! and others far less. Spend your efforts in doing things the way that Google wants. I’m not particularly happy about this, but it’s another hard truth.
The Content Marketing Hard Truth #2: It’s Expensive & Difficult, But It Works by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.