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:
- Content marketing is still considered to be separate from “real marketing”.
- Marketing and measurement are still solely thought of as ways to increase transactions, rather than as mechanisms for creating deeper relationships with consumers.
- 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?