Where Content Marketing Fails

Content in marketing is not new, even if the term content marketing is. No one ever intentionally produced marketing content that was anything other than persuasive, interesting and informative to its target audience. A TV commercial and a white paper both consist of content designed to sell. One can argue that a TV commer­cial sells product benefits, while a white paper sells the “authority” of its seller. One sell is “soft” and the other “hard.” But you also can argue that the seller’s authority is a huge product benefit in today’s commoditized marketplace and that soft is the new hard for today’s over-marketed consumer. If so, then the test of any marketing content has also not changed. That test is how well the content generates demand.

Where content marketing fails as a marketing model is that content is only one factor in demand generation. Other factors among many include measurement, distribution (reach), industry authority and strategy. If a piece of content is not working, it can’t tell you why. That’s because content marketing is not really marketing, but rather a “philosophy,” as Wikipedia describes it — i.e., “an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases.”

To know why a piece of content isn’t working, you need to use a marketing model that’s bigger than just content.

Performance Based Marketing
If the test of any content is performance then the test of any marketing model is how well it lets you manage the performance of any marketing variable, including content. Inbound marketing, for example, lets you conduct broad multi-factor analysis of variables involved in your marketing program in real time. It lets you measure how a change in one variable causes a change in the others, as well as in demand generation itself (i.e., quality and quantity of sales leads).

Inbound marketing can do this because it shares another advantage that models have over philosophies — i.e., explicit metrics for the variables you model, like “engagement,” “authority” and “lead value.” For example, based on your specific objective, engagement can be the number of content downloads or visits to specific landing pages. Authority is the number of inbound links to a web site from other high-authority sites. Lead value is propensity to buy (a function of engagement) and potential dollar spend. How you “actualize” these definitions — i.e, assign specific behaviors and numbers — will depend on your product, market size, market demographics, budget and other factors. What ultimately matters is that you do have definitions and that they are explicit.

Still a third criteria that separates the models from the philosophies is the ability to design, document, fine tune and enforce specific workflows around activities and goals.  Workflows let you optimize your processes over time based on past experience by fixing what’s broken and leveraging what works. A good workflow example is lead nurturing. A lead nurturing workflow is a choreographed series of activities you take with respect to a specific lead based on where the lead sits in the sales funnel. A middle of funnel lead may be offered a free 30-day trial (among other offers), for example, while an end of funnel lead may warrant an actual sales call. Again, your specific workflows will depend on your situation and past experience. That’s the point: one size does not fit all and you need something outside your content to guide you.

How To Make Marketing Perform
These three criteria for deciding whether you have a true marketing model — multivariate analysis, explicit metrics and defined workflows — among others, are not just nice, theoretical concepts. They have practical real-world consequences. A competent marketing model gives you answers to questions like: 

• Which keywords precipitated the most engagement?
• What calls to action “work better” on middle- or end-of-funnel leads?
• How are my blog topics, blogging rate or blog content affecting my authority relative to competitors in my industry?

The model vs. philosophy difference matters most when content apparently fails to generate demand. (“Apparent,” because it may not be the content’s fault.) That’s when content marketers say things like “content marketing only works if you market the content.” In other words, you should do something to generate demand for your content, first, and for you, second.

If your marketing isn’t selling you, and you don’t know why, you may be tempted to attract attention the old fashioned way — by buying it. If that’s you, it is yet another sign you’re following a marketing philosophy rather than a marketing model. Before you start spending money selling your content, you need to first figure out what it is about the content — and your other marketing variables — that is not selling you. And you can’t do that just looking at content alone.

Jeanne Hopkins is a digital and traditional marketing "mash up" and as Director of Marketing, has a ton of fun working with a fabulous team to generate 40,000-plus new leads each month for the HubSpot marketing software sales organization.