Traditional Content Marketing is Boring. Hot Take?
Branding is boring. My writing is boring me to tears.
These are just a few opinions I’ve dared to say out loud - as a writer and business owner over the past few weeks. I think these feelings speak to an issue, so to speak, that we don’t address often.
While marketing can be creative, it’s also very conformist. Marketing boxes you in from the jump, asking you to:
Sell to specific people
Have a very specific service you sell to said specific people
Have a brand voice that never changes. Be serious, sexy, exciting, inspirational, but never all of these.
Please your ideal consumer. Change is the enemy of a sale; change confuses people.
Pick colors and fonts.
Marketing is effective for a reason, and I’d be remiss not to say I enjoy it. I love figuring out what makes different people tick and looking beyond what is being sold into the consumer experience of a specific product.
One thing I truly struggle to enjoy is content marketing in the long term - specifically, bland content marketing.
You know the type.
“5 Reasons [Ideal Buyer] Needs [Product] for [Pain Point]”
“How to Use [Product] to Reach [Specific Goal Driven by Pain Point]”
These articles, especially in technical industries, can be a wealth of information for people learning more about certain services. I produce a lot of these articles for my own website.
Here are three I did in the past month alone that I think are truly good resources for healthcare professionals who want to know more about how SEO can help their business.
Healthcare SEO Agency vs. Freelancer: Which is Right for You?
Local SEO for Healthcare: Why Your Marketing Needs to Be Community Based
However, they become repetitive. They become a slog. They drag on with the same templated headlines and actionable advice.
I started writing because I love creating. Creating good f**king writing. Creating art. I continue creating because I love connecting with people over what I create.
Traditional content marketing kills creativity. It just does. Is it good for SEO? Absolutely. But I believe we need to take our work beyond “best practices.” Our business needs that oomph that underscores the human behind the screen.
This is my oomph. The hill I die on. That these boring content marketing/SEO best practices I run my business on are necessary to educate new audiences we’re trying to reach, to position ourselves as authorities in our fields, and to rank well on Google. And, there has to be more to our businesses than that, and I will not stop talking about it.
Because we are so much more than actionable tips! So much more than listicles! So much more than eye-catching statistics.
We are here for short periods of time to witness the miracle that is this Earth, this Goldilocks planet, and then we die. As a teacher of mine says, we are the gift of dying stars. These sentences alone contain enough unspoken questions that you and I could talk about for a long time.
Those questions - why am I here? Where do I go after this? What did humans do to deserve dogs? How can I make the most of my time on Earth? - drive me to create.
I want you to have information about how to grow your business. I have a lot of it. Book a call anytime.
But I cannot dole out answers to you dutifully, week after week, while ignoring the questions.
Last week I said to a client, “I want people to question everything.”
Content marketing gives us the answers we need. At our fingertips. It’s designed for Google, which is designed to give us answers at our fingertips.
Creativity gives us questions, and questions, and questions.
This week, I challenge you to think about what your business would look like if you stopped trying to be like everyone else and started trying to be more like the business you always dreamed of—the one where you could be yourself.
