Why It’s Time To Prioritize Your Content

Brand that invest in content are winning over those who don’t.

It’s no secret that people buy from those they like and trust. The hard part is getting them to feel that way about your brand. Every year it becomes more apparent that brands that don’t invest in authentic, valuable content are losing to brands that do.

In fact, content marketing converts at a 6x higher rate than other traditional methods (Source: Content Marketing Institute).

So, why are more brands not putting heavy resources into the space?

#1. Lack of Time/Resources

This is probably the most cited reason why small businesses don’t put effort into their content marketing. They’re too busy, and they don’t have the funds to outsource it.

This is rarely the case though.

While some types of content take a lot of time to create, others are relatively quick to churn out once you’ve nailed down a format.

A year ago, I wrote a blog post titled something like “How To Grow Your Photography Business: 30 Photographers Give Their Best Advice”. All I did was shoot emails to some photographers I knew, and copied their responses into a blog post.

Then, when I posted it almost all of them went and shared it, because they were excited to be featured in an article.

I got more business from that article than anything I’ve ever written, and it only took an hour or so total.

You can do that too. Find an easily repeatable but valuable format and crush it.

#2. Lack of Proper Planning

I can’t believe how many times I’ve visited a site, clicked on their blog, and seen a total of 4 posts with the last being from over a year ago.

While they may have initially thought there was value in content marketing, they failed to create a plan that forced repeated follow through.

I see this happening a lot with small businesses too, for a different reason. There’s no one explicitly responsible for the blog, so it falls to the wayside under the guise of “it’s someone else’s job”.

Plan your posts in advance, and have a single person explicitly responsible for ensuring they’re posted. Even if they’re not the one writing them, just tasking them with the responsibility to gather them normally does the trick.

#3. Lack of Immediate Results

You publish a post. Nothing happens. You publish another post. Nothing happens. You publish another post. Nothing happens. You quit.

The problem isn’t that content marketing doesn’t work. It’s that you failed to consistently create content that grows over time.

I’ve written a lot of posts that nearly no one has seen. I’ve also written posts that thousands have read. The thing is, I don’t know which a post is going to be before it’s published.

Quitting too early doesn’t build businesses.

What have you done to grow your content marketing efforts? Leave a response below, I’d love to write about it.