Content marketing is a hefty investment. According to my pals at the Content Marketing Institute, the average spend on content marketing in an organization is 28 percent of the marketing budget – and that’s not including staff. For that reason alone, companies can get skittish about content marketing. But there are other reasons to skip the investment.
If you’re not going to invest in content marketing and want to dissuade the C-suite from funding it, here are 12 pretty good reasons to avoid getting the funding you need.
- Lead generation isn’t important. Content marketing never helps with lead generation. Nobody ever fills out those email capture forms to download white papers or e-books. It’s worthless content, and your customers don’t have time to educate themselves.
- Neither is sales. Your sales people really don’t want a list of people who have expressed interest in your company’s product or service. They really love cold-calling, so don’t even bother creating content that can be put behind email capture forms or has calls to action so that prospects will actually call your sales people, instead of the other way around.[tweetthis twitter_handles=”@cparizo”]Sales people love cold-calling. Definitely don’t invest in content marketing to generate leads.[/tweetthis]
- Lead nurturing is a waste of time. I mean, really, who wants to be able to send a nice warm prospect a piece of content that you just produced? A case study of a company facing the exact same challenges, or an email campaign that keeps the prospect interested? No, better to let those leads flounder and go cold.
- Nobody’s got time for brand awareness. It didn’t work for American Express when it produced its OPEN Forum, and it didn’t work for SAP. Nobody knows what Red Bull is. Clearly, content marketing hasn’t worked to raise the profile of any of those brands, so it definitely won’t work for yours. Don’t waste your time.
- You don’t think case studies are effective. Prospects don’t want to know that other companies just like theirs have solved the exact same problem. They don’t want to see the products in action. But be forewarned, the 66 percent of respondents in the B2B Content Marketing – 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report might disagree with you.
- White papers are worthless. Prospects don’t have problems, and they don’t want to hear about solutions. You can’t do anything with white papers, anyway. No, prospects are just going to listen to your sales force and whip out their corporate credit cards, without reading anything else about your product or solutions. Even though 63 percent of respondents to the B2B Content Marketing survey say otherwise.
- Producing engaging content is too hard. Nobody likes doing things that are difficult, and you don’t have writers on staff. That’s fine; don’t produce engaging content. There’s a huge shortage of content writers out there, so it’s not like you can find anyone who speaks Engineer or has a background in journalism.
- I don’t need my customers to trust me. Prospects and customers love it when companies just have a basic website without any meaty content. They love seeing their vendors and prospective vendors sit quietly on the sidelines, until it’s time to sell. Thought leadership is overrated.[tweetthis twitter_handles=”@cparizo”]Prospects and customers love it when companies just have a basic website without any content.[/tweetthis]
- It’s just too darned expensive. You know what, you’re absolutely right. Content marketing is really expensive, and allocating budget to it is a waste of time. It’s not like content ever goes viral, or colleagues discuss what they’ve read at meetings or networking events. There’s no ROI in pieces that the sales force can use to nurture leads. You’re so much better off spending money on traditional advertising.
- My competition is already doing it. I get it. You’re a maverick. You think outside the box. Your company doesn’t follow the rules. And your competition already has a ton of white papers and case studies on its website, not to mention a well-read blog and some heavily-shared videos. I mean, you just can’t compete with that, and you don’t want to be like those stuffy old guys anyway. Profits are silly.
- I get enough traffic to my website, thank you. Content marketing doesn’t help at all with SEO. It’s better to just be grateful for whatever traffic you get from your website, because prospects don’t use search engines to look for solutions at all.
- It’s just a fad. Much like pet rocks and lava lamps, content marketing is going away. It hasn’t been used successfully by Michelin or John Deere in the pre-internet era. Nope, it’s something completely new, borne of the whims of greedy marketers, and it’s going to go away, much like the internet already has.
So why aren’t you investing in content marketing? Is it because of one of these reasons, or do you have a better one? Sound off in the comments.