Content marketing anti-patterns

The excellent John Bonini dropped another content marketing truth bomb recently on LinkedIn. I like to think of these as a selection of anti-patterns.

A few ugly truths about marketing:

👎 Most testimonial quotes were written by the company, not the customer. The numbers/results often fudged.
👎 Most teams are looking at the same SEO data, from the same tools, as everyone else. (Then wonder why it’s so hard to differentiate.)
👎 Most teams’ marketing strategies begin with looking at what competitors are doing (without having the data, context, or results to know if it’s even worth the time.)
👎 Most podcasts were recorded and link dumped on social one time. The transcript copy/pasted on the blog. That’s all they get from it.
👎 Most podcast hosts ask terrible questions that result in more general, “how you…” type of advice.
👎 Most newsletters are just a promotional vehicle for company news.
👎 Many are only sharing the greatest hits on social, therefore missing a tremendous opportunity to relate, empathize, and build trust with the audience.

The bar is set low, my friends.
Don’t look at and/or copy what others are doing.
It’s a fast path toward undifferentiated content.

I’ve been working on content for many years. I think I started in Technical and Enterprise Marketing at VMware in about, what, 2007? SInce then I’ve done content for Big Co and Little Co, mostly in the tech B2B industry.

I can honestly say that I’ve committed all of the crimes listed above and felt the disappointment and frustration. 🤣

Via the hard route, I also learned to spot, avoid, and where necessary remediate these anti-patterns.

I will share these in a separate, following post, because for now I want to explain WHY common reasons I’ve seen WHY these anti-patterns happen.

1. Leadership – The company leadership don’t value content and treat it as a low-value, bolt-on, low-cost, low-effort, “get the intern and AI to do it” activity.
   
2. Bandwidth – Marketing are expected to do it on their own. Own it, be experts in it, find the time and budget for it, execute it, measure it, improve it. Have you seen the workload on marketers? It’s insane.
   
3. Ownership – Because “it’s marketing’s job” is a thing, it fundamentally breaks the essential chain (or sausage machine) of this who process: it takes a village to do content right. Customers, partners, employees, marketing, sales, leadership, customer success, product… E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E.
   
4. Systematize – To do this well you need a well oiled system: but how do you get from zero to hero? How does someone go from having no money, no driving licence, and and no driving experience to be an F1 driver? The answer is: one step at a time. But how much time and investment do you have? Do you need to be F1, or just driving a milk float?
   
5. Imposter Syndrome – One of my peers had a great point about our old friend, Imposter Syndrome, today. A lot of content marketing is blowing your own trumpet, or at least letting people know you have a trumpet, but without making people cover their ears. This is an important technique. You can’t be a bull in a china shop. Great content needs honesty, openness, authenticity, and vulnerability. Not everyone can, or wants to, do that.

These are five of the most common reasons I’ve seen over the past 10-15 years. GenAI aint gonna help you here. Crap in; crap out. Gotta fix it from the root. GenAI is a flywheel, for crap and for good.

In the next post in this series I’ll go through some patterns in response to the anti-patterns. There’s a 2D horizontal and vertical aspect to this:

• Horizontal — the range of activities to do, podcast, video, blog, different channels etc.
• Vertical — how deep you go on each activity, and your experience and expertise.

I’ll update this post with a link to the next one when it’s ready — soon!