The second common mistake companies make in content marketing is that their content just isn’t useful.
Many companies with an online presence think that blogs, social media pages, and other new media platforms are simply a different kind of amplifier for the same promotional and self-glorifying messages.
The less useful a company’s messages are, the more we try to tune them out. When there was only one show on TV, you had to sit through the commercials. Now, you can change the channel, find a new podcast, unsubscribe from the list, delete the app, unfollow a feed, or a host of other ways to avoid content you have no use for.
Yet some content sources stick around on our devices. We can’t bring ourselves to unsubscribe because we think there might be something we’ll eventually get out of it. When a brand fulfills a promise to make our life better, we are much more willing to stick it out with them and listen to what they have to say.
The content you create should be so useful that when someone starts purging their phone/email/podcast list, yours is never considered for the chopping block.
Types of Usefulness
Think About What I Think About
The average customer spends exactly 0 seconds thinking about your company throughout the day. They have a lot of other things going on. The biggest hurdle for most companies to become really useful is that they assume their target community is thinking of the solution their product solves all the time.
For example, let’s assume you sell revolutionary software that standardizes the way companies receive invoices from vendors. You could come up with several blog posts about the problem your product solves, but you can only take the invoicing thing so far before people start to lose interest.
Instead, you could think like your ideal community and realize that most of their day is spent worrying about Supply Chain Management. This is a much more relevant topic that could keep their interest a lot longer.
Solve My Other Problems
Most people in your ideal community have needs your product can’t solve. The need to be connected, to stay up to date, to belong to a community, to feel empowered, to be understood, to be one of the ‘cool kids’.
A Chamber of Commerce might promote itself by putting on fortnightly workshops at nice hotels targeted at CEOs. They may think that the draw of the workshops is the speaker who imparts information and discusses trends. However, the real reason many of the CEOs come might be because they don’t often get a chance to meet other CEOs of similar sized businesses and this gives them a consistent opportunity to do so.
When the CEO’s schedule starts getting too busy, she won’t toss you from the calendar because your speakers are great, but because the networking is too valuable.
Make Me Smarter
Who doesn’t like feeling smarter? If you can package your content in a way that makes people feel like they’ve really learned something, you can tap into the mentor effect. We all subconsciously feel extremely indebted to those who have truly educated us on something that was very helpful. If you can fill that role for someone, they will feel an obligation to stick around with you and see what else you have to say.
Keep Calm, and Stay Useful
The more content that is created in the world, the more important being useful will be. If most of your content serves no purpose other than promoting yourself, you will soon be forgotten. Put together a plan to meet your ideal community’s core needs and build a loyal following.