Can our beliefs interfere with the success of our content marketing?

The answer is yes, according to a recent piece posted by the US Content Marketing Institute.

Author Robert Rose suggests three beliefs are ruining efforts by marketers to use content effectively:

  1. Content marketing is still considered to be separate from “real marketing”.
  2. Marketing and measurement are still solely thought of as ways to increase transactions, rather than as mechanisms for creating deeper relationships with consumers.
  3. Businesses still view content as an attribute of marketing, rather than as a distinct discipline that offers value in and of itself.

I couldn’t agree more, but then I came from journalism, not marketing, and so I am not afflicted by the self-limiting beliefs marketers suffer from. No siree – I’m afflicted by self-limited beliefs that journalists suffer from!

When people ask me what I do, I say I am a journalist tranforming myself into a content marketer. It’s been hard to overturn my own self-limiting beliefs to get here. Just some of them …

  • Content marketing is a journalistic sellout (Actually, content marketing and traditional media are working closely with each other.)
  • Companies in Australia don’t understand content marketing. (A lot don’t, but I found some that do.)
  • Content marketing is just well-disguised spin. (If it is, rewrite it.)
  • There is no way I can create a website that has 200,000 followers globally (Why not?)

I owe a lot to Joan Cameron, an amazing woman and founder of Your Beliefs Matter, who first challenged me to realise that my beliefs are simply that – beliefs.

If they are self-limiting, they are worth challenging. Joan has a consultancy helping people to “tap into higher levels of performance and results through accessing more of their minds”. She showed me how to challenge my self-limiting beliefs and make them melt away.

Often, when I am talking to marketers about content marketing, they tell me (dismissively) that they already “get it” and they never write “spin”.

Most of the time, that is simply not true. I have read literally thousands of appalling press releases from marketers in my 15 years as a journalist in mainstream media.

While these marketers’ beliefs keep them stuck in the old marketing paradigm, stopping them from learning about how to write reader-focused content, there are other clever marketers who are throwing off that kind of thinking.

Today, media is marketing. Or, as Rose puts it: “… when I see enterprises being truly successful with content marketing, [it’s when] the marketing group has stopped acting like a media company, and they’ve actually become a media company.”

Can you believe it?