The Pitfalls Of Too Much Self-Promotion
Over the past five years I’ve talked with hundreds of marketing professionals in the water and wastewater market. The most successful of these marketing professionals understand that their strategy must center on finding, identifying and consistently engaging their target audience. Secondarily, but equally as important, is knowing that reader-centric content is their optimal tool for getting in front of that audience and building up their trust in the brand.
Many of you follow marketing trends as closely as you follow the water and wastewater industry. You have read, many times here at B2BrandWater, about how important content marketing is to achieving business objectives. You have likely heard from other colleagues in the industry about how much value new content has brought to their company and their brand.
Once you decide to take the plunge yourself, it’s natural that you are going to want to maximize your investment in content and improve its performance. The problem however is that when I see companies, especially in this industry, try to get the most impact out of their content, they end up producing counterproductive assets. How? Well, they over mention themselves and their solution superiority at every opportunity.
Look, promotion isn’t inherently evil and completely counterproductive. It does have a place. But it should only be part of the plan and typically towards the end of the buyer’s journey when they are choosing between vendors.
A recent study found that 79% of editors say that the biggest problem they see with received content is that it’s too overtly promotional. Keep in mind that these same editors have an obligation to grow their audience and deliver valuable and engaging content. Marketers, on the other hand, are challenged to drive brand, identify potential customers and deliver on lead generation objectives. Those are two very different missions but must come together to be effective. Kevin Westerling, Chief Editor of Water Online, says that, “We have a responsibility to our growing audience to continue to provide them with the most engaging and relevant content as possible. Our audience responds much better to content that stays away from a sales pitch format and targets user interests above all else.”
So how do content writers (marketing professionals) and content distribution channels (publishers) work together to achieve their desired outcomes? By putting audience first.
As you create or review your brand’s content, ask yourself if it truly helps your customers or does it simply muddy the waters with promotion. Your entire content portfolio cannot be about you and must be about your audience and their interests, fears, and need for information. What interests them? What worries them? What should they be learning more about?
Content marketing is more cost effective, scalable and a lot more fun to administer as a basis for your marketing plan than anything else that has come before it. However, it must be done correctly or you risk losing that valuable audience you had hoped to gain in the first place. Welcome to marketing in 2018, you can do this.
Image credit: "Audience," The Next Web © 2011, used under an Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/