One of the reasons this blog started was to counter all those ‘how-to’ stories out there about content marketing. Worthwhile as they are, there is an element of repetition in articles promising ’10 tips to drive better content’.
Still, they are still around. So we decided to take a look with social media BuzzSumo at the three most-shared stories over the past week that feature the term content marketing.
1 The secret weapon that will make you and your business stand out in the war of ideas
A short comment piece in The Entrepreneur magazine by author Carmine Gallo. Essentially, five tips including advice such as “Show heroes and villains” and “If you’ve faced hardship, share it”. This received 2,700 Facebook likes and 960 and 792 Twitter and LinkedIn shares respectively.
2
This post from HubSpot does what it says on the tin. Tips include “Open with questions that get the reader to say yes” and “Double tap the enter button every 1-to-3 sentences”. There was also this one: “Put key points in bold”, which I don’t recall from my journalism training. This got around 1,500 shares on both Twitter and LinkedIn.
3 Avoid these common B2B content marketing mistakes
Again the title probably gives the game away. “Mistakes” include focusing too much both on thought leadership and personalisation. Obviously, this one also did rather well with 1,900 LinkedIn shares over the past week.
It is easy to understand why this sort of story is popular. We all like easy answers, whether to do with writing content, SEO, drawing up infographics or whatever. Yet the fact that there are so many of such articles – often stating similar objectives – suggests none of them is succeeding.
Maybe that is because all content is different and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
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