Genuine Content Marketing Is Hard. Here’s How to Make it Work.

Why Endless Content Production Falls Short

Once upon a time, tossing a bunch of keyword-stuffed posts on your shiny new blog might have been enough to catch Google’s attention. Marketers relied on outdated tricks like:

• Repeating keywords endlessly in the first paragraph.
• Slapping those keywords into every H2.
• Squeezing those keywords into the URL.

But those days are long gone — if they ever truly worked for you in the first place. (If so, you had lucky timing!) Google’s smarter now. Since 2020, Google has released a core algorithm update approximately every 95 days, often reinforcing that they prioritize high-quality content over keyword-stuffed nonsense. Or even keyword-riddled mediocre content.

And it’s not just Google that’s wising up. So are internet users. They’ve become more discerning, with more options than ever before. The sheer volume of content online has exploded over the past decade, saturating search results. Google the most obscure topic, and you’ll get billions of results instantly, each vying for attention.

Everyone’s publishing content, searchers have endless choices, and Google sees through the old tricks. So how do you make your content stand out in this crowded digital landscape?

Content-Driven Marketing Requires a Holistic Strategy

You need more than blog posts to win business online. That much is clear. You need content-driven marketing.

Whereas content production implies a churn-and-burn, content-farm approach, content-driven marketing demands end-to-end strategy. You must:

• Plan. Be deliberate about the topics you choose, and map out your content ahead of time. It’s about more than keywords. What does your target buyer want to learn more about?

• Develop. This is the creation part. Be sure your words — whatever form they may take — reflect thought-out SEO practices (read: stop keyword stuffing). Produce high-quality content.

• Promote and distribute. You’ve done the work to craft a purposeful, well-written piece of content. Don’t let it just sit on your site. Promote it via social and email, and consider paid media as well.

• Repurpose, refresh, and repromote. More on this below, but just because you’ve written about a topic once doesn’t mean you can’t revisit it. In fact, it’s required to prove you’re a legit subject matter expert. Also, refreshing (with existing analytics in mind) and then repromoting your content is arguably as important as creating it the first time.

• Report and analyze. Not to sound clichéd, but you can’t manage what you can’t measure. How will you know what is and isn’t working if you don’t measure and adapt your content practices?

Practical Tips to Execute Your New Content Marketing Strategy

Once you’ve got your content-driven marketing strategy in place and your team’s humming along creating high-quality content, there are a few more practical tips you should keep in mind:

Content Clusters Prove Your Expertise

As mentioned earlier, creating one or even a handful of articles on a topic isn’t enough.

To prove to Google and your audience that you’re an authority, you need to build a network of content around your main topics, known as content clusters.

Imagine you’re a healthtech marketer aiming to rank for “telehealth.” Writing a single article on telehealth won’t cut it. You need comprehensive content that covers every angle, like remote patient monitoring, telemedicine, HIPAA compliance, second opinions, and more.

But generating endless content ideas can be challenging. This is where SEO tools like MarketMuse come in handy. MarketMuse analyzes your existing content and suggests related topics, often highlighting high-search-volume opportunities with low-quality competition — perfect for creating valuable, rank-worthy content.

Ultimately, success hinges on establishing yourself as a leader in your field. Thoroughly covering every facet of your subject area is key.

Think Outside the Blog Box

Despite what most people think, content is much more than the written word. And even if you stick to “traditional” copy, there’s still so much more to content marketing than blog posts. White papers, eBooks, case studies, videos, the list goes on and on.

Non-blog content tends to be underutilized because, frankly, it’s harder to do. A webinar, for instance, requires coalescing multiple speakers, ideating questions in advance, acquiring webinar technology, and so forth.

That said, the extra effort is worth it. Leveraging multiple forms of content in multiple ways maximizes your content’s ROI. Can you extract a few salient points from that webinar? Great, make a checklist. Can you summarize the webinar’s key takeaways? Perfect, that’s a separate article. And how about all the email and social promotion before, during, and after the webinar?

You can also squeeze more from your content investment by combining content. Blog posts with embedded videos get significantly better results than video-less content. Google truly puts videos on a pedestal — reader relevant ones like this:

Your Options for Content Marketing Success

Everything we’ve covered boils down to one crucial point:

True content marketing success demands a blend of art (compelling, thought-provoking content) and science (strategic content clustering, data-driven reporting, and precise SEO tactics).

You have four paths forward:

1. Hire a content mill.
2. Hire an SEO agency.
3. Go it alone.
4. Partner with an agency that masters both content creation and SEO.

The first option will lead to exactly what I’ve warned against this whole article: churn-and-burn content production sans holistic strategy.

The second option, an SEO agency, will likely focus mostly on ticking SEO boxes — adding metadata, formatting pages, optimizing H1 tags — without crafting the standout content you need to nurture prospects alongside winning keyword rankings.

The third option, handling everything in-house, might seem viable — until you realize the expertise and resources you’re missing out on (and others, like your competitors, may be leveraging). Can you truly execute a content-driven strategy on your own?

If you’re serious about content marketing, you need a partner who excels at both the art and science — not just content production, but genuine content marketing that drives results.

Yes, real content marketing is challenging. But with a real deal agency, it’s achievable—and it’s worth it.

Editor’s note: This content was originally published on June 30, 2021, and has been updated to maintain its relevance.