Pros and cons of content marketing

For B2B services companies.

Content marketing seeks to provide useful information, where the long term goal is to be so helpful that people trust you enough to want to do business with you.

Pause. Re-read that first sentence.

Content marketing has been around longer than most people think, as in, before the days of the internet. The internet has just made it easier to do it poorly.

Content marketing is hard, so you won’t want to just jump in without having your head straight. The first step is to get a sense of the major advantages and disadvantages of content marketing.

Cons of content marketing

It requires long-term thinking.

You’re not going to be a pro at this in a handful of months. Even with an experienced guide, it takes time to really “get it”.

  • Strong empathy and patience are key.
  • It’s not a mechanical go-through-the-motions sort of process. If you think it is, your content will be DOA.

It can be very time-intensive.

Generating each piece of content takes time, usually involves multiple people, multiple drafts, and multiple reviews. Then there are the:

  • content strategy,
  • analysis,
  • promotion,
  • and optimization aspects as well.

High complexity marketing method

It’s often a quite complex method. Generally speaking you don’t just generate a single piece of content and start seeing results from it. It takes:

  • several pieces working together,
  • above-average content,
  • market engagement,
  • and competitive positioning to stand a chance.

Empathy required

You have to be super empathetic, and that’s exhausting. It’s one of the most important aspects of deciding to do content marketing.

Whenever you create a new piece, you have to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customer. What do they care about? What do they not? What are they going to want to know next?

It can be very frustrating.

Why? Because you’ll likely create many pieces of content and have only a small fraction of them get traction.

  • If you don’t already have thick skin, you’ll develop it during this process, or you won’t make it.
  • If not carefully managed, this can bring down the morale of everyone involved in the content marketing process.

It’s not a complete solution on it’s own.

Creating content is a great step. However, if you don’t have a plan to get it in the hands of customers or potential customers, then what’s the point? You’ll need to utilize methods like inbound, search, social, email, account-based marketing, and sales enablement, along with the content in order to push your content to the right people, or attract the right people to your content.

Pros of content marketing

Being less annoying and more helpful

You get to be more helpful and less annoying, that is, if you take it seriously.

Content marketing is all about providing useful information to educate/inform your audience to build trust so that they want to consider engaging with you with a need (that need may be near term or far).

People don’t like to be sold to. So stop irritating them by doing so. You’re going to start being authentically helpful. You’ll feel better about the whole sales process also. If done well, it’s a win-win.

It can really facilitate your sales process.

There are 3 main use cases where content can facilitate your sales process after a potential customer has engaged with sales:

  1. Providing a case study for validation
  2. Providing an article that showcases your company’s knowledge on a particular topic that the potential customer is interested in.
  3. Pointing the potential customer to a focused landing page that showcases your company’s capability in some particular domain of interest.

Feedback from your potential customers

It can enable awesome feedback on who’s interested in what topics. This comes into play after you’ve started to build up a strong set of content. You then start analyzing which content is getting traction.

Forcing a niche

It forces you to think about what your best at, and define one or more niches. As you get into content generation, it’ll start to become apparent where your company’s gaps are and where your strengths bubble up. It can sometimes seem disappointing because you may think you want to go in one direction, but there’s too many holes to be plugged. This is actually a good thing, because it’s a forcing function to help you focus on what you’re best at, or at least recognize and take action on gaps.

The importance of finding the right balance

There’s a very tricky balance to obtain regarding providing useful information for the right audience. You have to focus most of your effort on providing content that’s most useful for those people that are most likely to become customers some day. That may sound easy, but it’s not at all. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of creating content that either:

  1. Amounts to blabbing about yourself (ie. your potential customer doesn’t care), or
  2. is most interesting to a group of people adjacent to your ideal target audience.

Next Steps

Thinking about getting started with content marketing? Don’t just dive in. You can spin your wheels indefinitely without ever getting traction (see Content Marketing for Engineering Companies for a few tips).

You need to first decide if you’re using content for lead generation, sales support, or both. This will drive your incorporation of other inbound and/or outbound digital marketing methods because if your content just sits there, it doesn’t do anyone any good. See here for how to get started with digital marketing, and if you’re curious about inbound marketing, check out the pros and cons of inbound.

If you’d like a guide to facilitate this process or someone to help you develop empathetic content, reach out and we can chat.

Yes, let’s chat

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