There was a meme going around the internet of someone being elated and saying, “me recording my podcast,” and then the same person pulling their hair out and saying, “me remembering I now have to market my podcast.” There was a lot of conversation around it.
We all love creating content. We love making our videos, podcasts, or articles, but the fact is, a lot of times it’s a pain to market the content that’s supposed to serve as your marketing. This might seem a little counterintuitive but—
Content marketing is really an asset to drive toward goals like attention, awareness, engagement, and conversions.
This Content Snacks series is an asset to increase awareness about what HEARD Media does and drive engagement with our audience long term. However, if we just leave it at that, then we’re doing a disservice to our company and to the content that we’ve created.
With all this content we’ve invested energy, creative effort, and money into to create, we’re not getting to the end of the process by stopping once the creation is done.
Traditional advertisements
Think about traditional advertisements you may have tried in the past. You might have set up a booth at a trade show, bought a mailing list for direct mailers, bought a billboard, or bought an ad at the beginning of a movie at the movie theater.
The thing all of those executions have in common—aside from being wildly outdated, which they are (if you’re doing those things, you are wasting money)—is they have a built-in audience who is viewing the ad.
- When you buy a billboard, you’re designing a canvas and you will inherently have cars driving by
- When you set up a booth at a trade show, you design the booth and there will be people walking by
Side note: Traditional advertisements are outdated because they’re inefficient. You can’t control whether or not the people who walk through the trade show are relevant buyers of yours. You can’t control whether or not the people driving by the billboard care about what you’re selling. You can when it comes to content, at least much more than you can with traditional advertisements.
With content, a lot of times we avoid targeting people who don’t care, but we then forget that we still need to put it in front of eyeballs who do care. Nobody just sees your content naturally.
It’s not a field of dreams situation where if you publish all the time people will eventually come organically. That happens very infrequently.
You need to think about how you’re going to invest in your content the way you would in a traditional execution.
While creating content is cheaper than traditional advertisements, investing the six-figure sums you would for two days of traditional marketing could last you years in terms of bringing audience members to look at your content.
You’re leaving attention on the table if you don’t support your content the way you would a mailing campaign, billboard ad, or tradeshow booth.
You wouldn’t have a billboard ad printed and then leave it in the back parking lot of your company. You go pay for it to be put up in front of an audience. It’s the same thing with your content.
Investing in an audience and ensuring that the target audience is seeing the content you produce is the bulk of the work in content marketing, and it’s the critical step to creating and distributing content as well. Otherwise, you’re just yelling into the void and wasting your energy.
In that case, you might as well go back to print ads. DON’T because that’s a bigger waste of money, but you get what I’m saying.
