Content Marketing Myth 4

No, the content that works for someone will not necessarily work for you. Where’s your originality?

Another one of the things I constantly keep hearing about is – “Look what they have done. We should do something like this.”

Only that they don’t mean something ‘like’ what they have seen. They mean doing exactly that!

The logic in their mind being – If it worked for them, it sure will work for us too. Oh, how I wish I could tell you how wrong you are.

I’ll give you one example and you’ll know exactly what I mean. Search for ‘the best marketing tools’ and tell me what you see. You’ll get an endless list of search results of articles written on that keyword, most of them even listing down the same tools. So you just randomly pick out the one whose site you’ve heard of before, and who seem to make more sense to you.

Well, what about the others? They spent as much time writing the same article. So why not them? Think about all the hard work that they did (copying).

You don’t care right? That’s exactly how your target audience thinks too.

Now if someone out of all these people focused on writing a blog that lists down ‘the best marketing tools’ for ‘healthcare startups’ or for ‘enterprise software products’, the article would have stood out and grabbed attention, pulling the right audience to it instantly.

Because honestly, what’s one going to do with a list of 50 marketing tools that you find ‘best’, but are no use to their industry?

That’s why you need to stop copy-pasting your competitor’s content marketing strategy.

Take inspiration, but don’t copy it. Here are a few reasons why:

Your competitors may be as clueless as you about what they’re writing
You don’t know what they’re doing write to make that content work (or wrong, that makes it fail)
You don’t have the same resources (think manpower, promotion budget, software – everything)
Your audience and theirs could have a subtle, but significant difference
Your audience may be looking for better content (weren’t you tired of endlessly going through the generic lists of marketing tools?)

Now some may counter this with a line that says something like, “but that’s a framework that we have seen work, so why do we try something new?”

Okay, did your competitor just give you access to their Google Analytics? Or were they sweet enough to tell you how that content is working for them?

None. Right?

Here’s what you should be doing instead before starting out with content marketing:

Set a clear goal for your content
Select the right tools and the right resources for your content
Conduct an in-depth competitor analysis
Analyse what your target audience is talking about online (and maybe offline)
Identify content opportunities (do what others are not doing)
Test and measure everything you d

I’ll give you an example of this. RevTap is an analytics tool for eCommerce businesses. Now typically, you’d see similar tools endlessly writing about the metrics you should be measuring – we did too, I’ll be honest.

While that content got us some hits in terms of traffic, it never really did anything more than that. So we gave our strategy a spin.

We invested more of our resources in creating properly structured courses that helped our target audience achieve their goals by following a simple A-Z guide. It took us longer to write these pieces, sometimes longer to design them – but these because the ones that got us the most traffic.

Not just that, a good rank on search results and an audience that turned into subscribers we could nurture personally.

We even turned it into an easy email course version.

Simply put, you need to find your niche in content marketing and go all out with it. It’s okay to copy a few things maybe – but find your differentiator!

Your end goal is not to become your competitor. It’s to make your own space in the industry that grabs attention.