In order to be effective at content marketing, you must produce a continuous stream of high-quality materials. While implementing and maintaining a content marketing program is certainly worth the effort, there is no ignoring that it is a significant effort. Consequently, you may be tempted to look for ways to streamline the content creation process—or stated another way, to cut corners. But there are many reasons you need to resist that temptation.
Let’s use the example of a simple 500-word blog post. The process for producing a clear, concise, and informative post and putting it online is:
- Outline
- Research
- Write
- Review
- Verify Proper Keyword Density
- Revise
- Approve
- Upload to CMS
- Enter Meta Data
- Review in HTML
- Approve HTML
- Publish
Cut corners on content creation to save a little time, effort, or money, and that decision will almost certainly come back to bite you in any number of ways.
- Inaccuracies — That research you should have done would have revealed some recent changes related to your topic. You’ve now published something that is incorrect.
- Incomplete Material — Wrapping up your writing a little more quickly than you should have may mean you’ve not thoroughly covered your topic.
- Poor Quality Content — No matter how good a proofreader you are, it’s hard to see errors in your own work. Skipping the review process could mean that significant problems go undetected—until they’re detected by your target audience.
- Critique by Your Competitors — The companies competing with you for the attention of your shared prospects won’t hesitate to bring it to their attention when you produce subpar content.
- Lack of Visibility — A lack of attention to keywords and meta data can have the result of making your content invisible to the outside world, i.e. poor search engine optimization (SEO).
- Loss of Readership — There is a lot of great content on the internet. If yours doesn’t live up to expectations, your audience will go elsewhere.
- Damage to Your Reputation — If they occur often enough, the problems above can ultimately begin to produce a negative opinion of your organization.
So the next time you’re thinking you’ll bang out a piece of content in 30 minutes, check the box, and move on to another task, think again. If content marketing is worth doing (and it absolutely is!), it’s worth doing right.
Ready to kick your content marketing into high gear? We can show you how. And we don't cut corners while helping our clients in Colorado Springs, along Colorado’s Front Range, or around the country achieve stellar marketing results.
