Why do we need to clear these misconceptions before we begin a solid content marketing strategy? Basically to avoid failure. If you don’t do justice to content marketing, you might end up paying the price and it will directly affect your sales.

However, if used rightly, content marketing is an excellent strategy to gain more than you expect!

And it’s time to cut to the chase and let you know what content marketing actually is. 

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is an effective marketing strategy that creates and distributes content of all sorts (blogs, videos, white papers, social media posts). It doesn’t aim to promote the brand to avoid sounding salesy but smartly educates the audience on the product or service to nudge the audience’s interests.

One of the most popular content marketing myths is that it’s all about just giving out information about the product or getting people to buy the product. No, that’s not it. Content marketing is all about giving out valuable and relevant content to a targeted audience.

There are four main benefits to content marketing:

• Creates customers who are loyal to the brand
• Increases sales
• Saves money on advertising
• And the content you create itself becomes a selling point

Before we move to the blog’s main objective, let’s understand that content marketing is already difficult without any misformation. 

And so we must bust these content marketing myths!

Myth #1: The more content, the better

This is one of the biggest misconceptions out there. People think that churning content left and right or creating long-format content will get you the results. 

A longer content format does work but only when it is highly focused and you need to do your research on cracking long-format content.

You need to remember that it is best to create quality content consistently than to create thousands of mediocre content which is not valuable to the readers in any way. 

In addition to that, your content will never be on the first page of the SERP because Google penalizes low-quality content and considers it spam.

So, to bring out high-quality content, you need to put a lot of effort into the planning stage of the content creation process.

Set realistic goals for your content marketing campaigns, analyze the metrics and hold yourself accountable for the results. This will help you to not only create highly compelling content but help you improve yourself to become the best content marketer!

#Truth: High-quality content always wins! Keep your audience in mind while creating content.

Myth #2 Content marketing gives quick results

It’s an unfortunate reality that content marketing takes time to show results. Even though the results show later than expected, it creates a sturdy bond with your audience like any other marketing strategy.

Why?

Because it takes time to become an online authority as you are competing on a global scale. It also takes Google time to find your posts to crawl.

And you can’t precisely measure your ROI with a piece of content but here’s how you can!

Content marketing influences revenue in different ways:

• It raises brand awareness.
• It gives additional information to potential customers and guides them to make a purchase.
• And it is an excellent way to stay in touch with existing customers and create a loyal following.

Content strategy is valuable regardless of whether you get a quick result or not. It’s not costly like a paid advertisement. The results will constantly increase and are directly equivalent to the effort you put in to optimize it! And products like Sotrender help you monitor social media marketing’s performance to understand and improve your content marketing strategy.

Social media analytics tools allow you to get a better understanding of which content performed best, when it got the most engagement, and who your target audience consists of. You can use Sotrender to generate white-labeled reports that will tell you everything you need to know about your content marketing performance, as well as your sponsored content performance on social media.

Sign up for the free 14-day trial period and try it out yourself. If it gets you the information you need, it’ll save you time on checking your content marketing results.

#Truth: Content marketing is slow but gives reliable results. It uses the touchpoints of potential customers and gently pushes them to make a purchase.

#Myth 3: Social Media Marketing Has Outrun Email Marketing

We all know that social media has changed the way we look at marketing. But it would be an overestimation to believe that social media marketing has made email marketing obsolete.

Email is still one of the most effective marketing channels to promote content, engage with potential or existing customers, and be non-intrusive.

Here’s why email marketing must be part of your content marketing strategy:

• For every dollar you spend on email marketing, you get $42 as your ROI.
• And 9 out of 10 content marketers use email marketing software to distribute content organically.
• With a powerful segmentation feature, properly personalized and meaningful email templates, your emails are non-intrusive, and your brand’s content will not be considered spam.

#Truth: Email marketing and content marketing have the perfect relationship like Sherlock Holmes and Watson. They complement each other by creating a balanced relationship with readers by using segmentation and buyer personas.

#Myth 4: Videos Aren’t As Important As Other Content Format

Video marketing has come into play only recently. And we know how new things are scary and might seem difficult at the beginning. Rest assured, video marketing is not difficult, nor is it expensive as one might assume. 

Although it is possible to have an impactful content marketing strategy without videos, you would benefit greatly from including them. In fact, video marketing allows you to make an already effective strategy even more effective.

Here are some compelling reasons why you need to use videos in your content marketing strategy:

• Boosts dwell time on websites
• Improves SEO ranking
• People like engaging with video content
• Videos can be uploaded on many platforms, unlike blogs.

#Truth: Videos don’t take a lot of time or effort, or money. You only need to make it engaging to the target audience. And it has become more critical than ever.

#Myth 5: Only Some Businesses Need Content Marketing

This one cannot get far from the truth. To be precise, content marketing is not an industry-specific strategy. It works wonders for all types of businesses. 

On a basic level, content marketing is all about storytelling. And it is up to you to tell the story from a unique perspective and make it attractive to the audience to make them into customers.

Here are a couple of ways to effective content marketing:

• Be engaging
• Be inspirational, educational, and interesting
• Focus less on selling your products
• Focus more on how you are telling the story and what your audience will like
• Be relevant and valuable to the audience
• Create 7 to 8 detailed buyer personas
• Create content for every touchpoint on the customer journey
• Understand customer lifecycle.

#Truth: Content marketing works for all types of businesses. And it will give you results as long as you are not salesy.

It’s A Wrap!

Content marketing is a long-term investment. It will not yield immediate results, but the longer you wait, the greater the returns are. 

And not everyone can produce compelling content that will speak to people. So make sure to give the job to the right creative mind. 

And a final food for thought, never write or produce content for the SERP. Write for real humans: your target audience and your content marketing will thrive with no problem whatsoever!

Would you like to share with us more content marketing myths? Drop them in the comments section!