Content marketing isn’t about following trends. It isn’t even about going viral, although it would be nice to get that as well. What’s the backbone of content marketing is creating evergreen content or content relevant no matter at which point in time it may be.
With that said, many challenges or misconceptions can cloud people’s content marketing strategies regarding evergreen content. To help steer you in the right direction, here are several myths that you shouldn’t apply to your content strategy.
It Is Just For Advertising.
Content marketing is a lot different from advertising, something that business owners or companies might not know. Content marketers and advertisers, on the other hand, should know this difference. It would be a mistake to lump these two together to muddle each’s results and performance.
If you want to make your content marketing and advertising efforts work well, you have to separate them from each other. You might mistake them to be the same because they could have the same goals in the long run. However, that’s where most of the similarities usually lie.
When it comes to content marketing, you’re likely to get organic traffic from this after a long time. That’s because content marketing is all about extended plays. It builds your reputation and authority. It’s as much PR and branding strategy as it is marketing.
On the other hand, advertising is where you get paid traffic or traffic from paid ads. Paid ads are useful but are usually short-term and require payment to get the reach that it does.
In your strategy, you can lump these two together and create a harmonic and robust plan for your business to get you results on both ends.
Creating More Is Better.
Larger companies can get away with creating a ton of content and dropping them off all in one day. However, smaller businesses don’t have the luxury or human resources to be able to do that. Nonetheless, there are plenty of companies, both large and small, that don’t use the strategy of creating a ton of content all in one day to get results.
The idea that churning more content is better is not the best hill to die on as a content marketer. The key is to think about your target audience. You want to make sure that you create quality content that they want to read. It should be less about creating as much content as possible and more about being as relevant and valuable as possible to your target audience.
If your focus and goal aren’t right, your hundreds of content will be a waste of effort and time in the long run.
You Don’t Need Video Content.
When you think of evergreen content, the thing that first comes to mind would be written content. However, that’s not the only content you should be thinking about to create a well-rounded content strategy. You should also make sure that you find a way to incorporate more video content in your content strategy.
What’s great about video content is that it’s more engaging than many other content types out there. Therefore, it would be worthwhile to start thinking about the kinds of video content that would best suit your business.
Of course, much like any other content piece, you must be deliberate with your video content. You have to strategize to ensure that the video content is useful and relevant to your audience. That’s the key to success for video content and any content.
Nobody Reads Anymore
There’s an ongoing myth in our digital age that people have an attention span that’s less than that of a goldfish. Although this idea has spread far and wide, a bit of research will show you that it’s more complicated than that. After all, there’s a reason why content writing packages are still something that businesses, both big and small, look for to succeed.
Instead of saying that people don’t have long attention spans that make them adverse to reading, it’s more that people’s attention spans vary depending on what they need to pay attention to. That’s why content marketing and creating evergreen content also involve more than creativity. There’s also strategy involved here.
You want to make sure that your content is something that people would like to spend their time on and pay attention to. This idea implies that you can’t get away with posting any content for your content marketing to work. You have to bring relevant information and something of value to your content.
At the same time, you want to make it attractive to your readers. That’s because your readers are used to getting bombarded with content all around the Internet. Thus, it’s not like nobody reads anymore. It’s that more people are selective with the content that they read.
It Won’t Work In Another Industry.
When you think of content marketing, you think of short blogs, listicles a la Buzzfeed, and other fast and bite-sized content. If you don’t have much experience in content marketing, you might think that your “serious” industries don’t require content marketing. However, this is a common misconception of content marketing.
Instead of thinking that your industry doesn’t benefit from content marketing, you should think of which content suits your sector better. After all, industries like biotech or even manufacturing and shipping all make use of content marketing. Thus, there are endless possibilities for content marketing out there.
It Is Not Sustainable.
There’s this looming fear for people who create content that they might run out of content to produce. After all, if you’ve covered the most commonly answered questions, what else is there to cover that’s relevant to your customers? Well, there’s plenty still that you can talk about, although it takes time to notice what they are.
All you need to observe would be your customers or your target audience to find content ideas. Keyword research can even help you find content ideas that you wouldn’t think your target customers worry about.
However, you can even look at what your current customers are saying whenever they engage with your business. There are plenty of content ideas to find there.
The More Technical It Is, The Smarter.
If you were back in school and you pursued higher education, you probably adapted to a writing style that is highly specific to your course. That’s why many people who come from educated backgrounds might suffer the sin of beginner content writers who write long passages with wordy and complicated jargon.
Any respectable professional or company offering content writing services knows that you have to adapt the content based on the industry. Sometimes, even if you’re in a high niche and technical sector, you still need to have approachable and easy-to-understand content. Otherwise, your content marketing is less about marketing and more about content, not the way to go about it.
Most of the time, if your readers can’t understand the content upon first reading, they’re probably going to click away and find one they know. That’s why it’s crucial that you pay attention to who you’re writing for and your content’s goal. Both of them will guide you on the writing style that best works for the business.
There will be times when more technical works, but there are still ways for you to make it approachable.
These evergreen content myths have been around the content marketing strategy world for a while, and knowing them should help you make the right decisions. Evergreen content and identifying the best content marketing strategies like those in this article should help you get a good gist of a good content marketing strategy.
It will get some getting used to, but once you know which ones work the best, you’ll soon find results for your content marketing.
