There is a mountain of content about all of the benefits of content marketing but a dearth of content about any of the risks. It seems every company out there is telling us that we need content, but what happens when you’re not doing it right? Is it hurting your brand? While it’s great to do it right, let’s be honest that there are some risks with content marketing if you don’t do it right. Here are 3 of them:
Risk #1: Messaging Mis-Alignment
If you are delivering core messages to prospects and leads versus to customers in a way that is not aligned, this can create customer confusion and the feeling that they have been misled.
How to Mitigate: it is important to align the messages being pushed out through all channels to leads and prospects with the support content channels. To do that requires that you align your strategy and planning between the different teams and team members responsible and get everyone on the same page. Having a center of content and strategy that can serve both as one source of truth for the different teams, and at the same time connects to the different channels for drafting, approvals and publishing makes it much easier to verify alignment.
Risk #2: Brand Inconsistency
Most enterprises have some form of a brand guidelines document. How do you know if it is being consistently followed? How do you maintain the rapid production of content, and consistency of messaging, without a content governance system in place?
How to Mitigate: To prevent this issue, you need a central library of approved assets, tagged with the appropriate metadata for search and retrieval that is tied directly to tools for execution and publishing. Aligning approved assets with approved strategy and embedding both within execution ensures consistency.
Risk #3: Content Irrelevancy
Marketers have already defined the creation of relevant content as a key challenge of content marketing, but there seems to be not enough of a realization of the risks of irrelevant content. Salespeople know that delivering the wrong message at the wrong time can have the effect of ‘talking yourself out of the sale’.
How to Mitigate: It is critical to make sure that content is relevant to each stage of the buyer cycle that the likely audience for that content is at. Having a tool that maps your strategic content themes to different parts of the buyer cycle, and lets you mark content in the planning stage according to the appropriate stage, helps to ensure that the content strikes the right tone and includes the right messages for each relevant stage.
Marketers know that to achieve engagement and impact requires relevancy. For the audience, this means relevant to their interests in relation to where they are in the buyer’s journey. Another aspect of relevancy is with regard to marketing objectives, making sure you are achieving the right things with your content. To accomplish this takes careful planning and strategy, aligned execution and getting everyone on the same page.
At Marketing.AI we take the challenges facing content marketers just as seriously as the potential benefits, and we’ve built our framework with this in mind. To find out how this can apply to the challenges of managing your content organization, sign-up for a free trial and get to work today.