So you're a small business owner. Maybe you oversee the marketing yourself, or get somebody else to. Either way, you've no doubt read a bit about content marketing, and how it's going to be – or indeed, already is – the next big thing.
(If not, you only need to look at Google Trends to see the growth in popularity of "content marketing" as a search term to understand how it has taken off in the last 2 years.)
Absolutely everything and everyone is telling you to produce content. So you think you probably should give it a go.
Yet despite the masses of information on the unavoidable reality of content marketing today, you may still be unconvinced. You may be thinking…
• Why does anyone care about what I write?
• How will I think of interesting things to write about?
• How are people going to find my content anyway?
• Will the content I produce be interesting enough for people to read?
• Will it make a difference to my revenues?
• Will it be worth the time and effort?
And crucially, our content marketing dilemma for today:
• If everybody's doing it, there must be so much out there already. Why should I add my worthless thoughts to the reams and reams of content that already exists?
So, why produce content?
You think producing content will be worthless when there is loads of great content out there already.
This is where you are wrong.
Velocity Partners made a great SlideShare presentation entitled Crap: The Content Marketing Deluge. And as its name might suggest, because of how quickly content marketing has taken off (leading to a significant skills gap), a lot of the masses of content now being produced is pretty rubbish. People are only doing content marketing because they think they should. And consequently, many are failing.
In our recent survey of 525 businesses, only 1 in 8 were able to maintain an active blog. And 63% of businesses surveyed have absolutely no online presence (blog, company news page that is regularly updated.*
We can't argue with the fact that everyone is talking about content marketing. Talking about doing it, spending more on it, the many benefits of it… But the reality is that many businesses still can't manage to do it well. And being one of the businesses who can will no doubt put you at a huge advantage over your competitors.
Not sure how to produce content that isn't a waste of space?
Well, there is no shortage of help available on the web. Just look at our post How to Create Content That is Perfect for Your Business for tips on creating content that is fresh, relevant and engaging. Or some of best ways to ensure you add value through your content, as The Key Component to All Great Blog Posts demonstrates.
Even if it wasn't the case that most content marketing efforts are pretty rubbish, there are still many good reasons why you should produce content on a regular basis:
• To demonstrate thought leadership and expertise
• To improve your own SEO
• To drive engagement and web traffic from sharing on social media
• To develop your brand identity and tone of voice
• To make your content even better than other, to give yourself the edge over competitors
So despite what you might think, there isn't actually loads of great content out there. And even if there was, there are still plenty of good reasons for your business to produce content anyway.
*a blog or company news page must have 3+ posts a year to be classified as "active" or "regularly updated" in our survey, a Twitter or Facebook page must have 1+ post a month.
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