With all the digital marketing experts around, it’s very easy for marketers to be taken in and spend their money on the wrong pursuits.
Technology and techniques seem to have taken over what really should be plain old marketing: focus on the customer, relentlessly.
As we work with large and mid-size customers in the B2B and B2C domains, we keep stumbling upon some of the mistakes that agencies get marketers to make. One of the biggest mistakes is putting up irrelevant content.
“Marketing is telling the world you’re a rock star. Content marketing is showing the world that you are one.”
– Robert Rose, Content Marketing Institute
There’s a myth that is still, amazingly, doing the rounds in online marketing circles: that it’s more important to have tons of content up there, rather than having content that delivers value to the target group (TG) related to your offering.
It’s a perfect strategy if you take your TG to be fools.
One of our customers followed this strategy. Their offering was a merchandising and assortment planning software, used by large retailers. Their existing SEO agency supplied them with content, which was submitted to us for review. We were shocked to see the content. Instead of covering forecasting inventory and local trends analysis, it talked about how aisles should be planned: well-lit, easy to move about, and so on. And the text around merchandise planning kept repeating very few keywords—clearly a case of keyword stuffing (which Google frowns upon).
The TG was supposed to be the CXO audience of retail companies. Imagine clicking to read about merchandising planning and then seeing stuff about aisles and lighting! No CXO would spend more than a second on that page. Bounce rate 100%!
Tell your content team to keep the TG in mind. What does the TG think and feel? What do they need to know? What can you tell them that help them get insights in your domain?
Think relevant content.
