No one wishes content marketing was the bomb as much as I do.

Content is my middle name. Actually, “Alan” is my middle name, but I like “content” so much better.

Almost my entire professional life has been spent with content – writing it, editing it, scripting it, mixing it, publishing it, and getting threatened with a lawsuit for having published it.

Lawsuits excepted, I am a big fan of what content can do. The written word mingled with compelling images is the highest form of human communication, and if you don’t believe me, pick up a really great magazine sometime.

(This is not mere suggestion, or wordsmithing for its own sake. I want you to buy a really great magazine – several would be better – and read it/them. The magazine biz thanks you, and I thank you.)

However, I am not convinced that really great content is the best way of selling a product or service.

In other words, I’m calling “time!” on content marketing.

Why?

Here’s why: Content marketing doesn’t jibe with the way humans actually behave – and to prove it, let’s outline a common interaction with website content.

So a man walks into a bar, only it’s not a bar but a website. At this point it’s not germane how or why he got there; he’s just there.

Somewhere on that website is a blog. Since it’s like most blogs, it’s buried off on the side nav or hidden in the footer, since most organizations that claim to do content marketing don’t put the content anywhere that’s easily found, as those spaces are reserved for the marketing that isn’t content marketing.

(And tell me again how you claim to be doing content marketing when you put your content where no one can find it. Oh, I see. It’s a “soft sell.” Yes, it’s soft all right. Very soft. Downright downy, if you ask me.)

Well, through some miracle the visitor finds the blog and reads the top post. Like most blog posts, it’s only tangentially relevant to the organization it’s ostensibly promoting, but it’s engaging enough that the visitor did not feel that two minutes of his time was a total waste.

It’s at this point that most content marketing falls apart. The man who walks into a bar and found a website feels no compulsion to read on or take a more direct action, like buying a product or even considering buying a product, because no further action has been required on his part.

While he feels his time was not wasted in a sense it was, because he really could have been sold something and not just given a nicely written piece or a neatly turned-out video.

He gone bye-bye, and all he’s done is given your analytics an infinitesimal boost, which you may choose to claim as proof that content marketing works in the absence of anything more concrete, like, you know, an actual sale.

Now, there may be a time when he chooses to buy, and he may choose to buy the product offered by the company with the website and the nice blog, but by that time he’s so far off the conversion track that attributing any impact from the blog on a sale would be a gross exaggeration at best, or a flat-out lie at worst.

It would be like handing someone an ice cube in July and then taking credit for the fact they’re feeling cold when they’re standing outside in Minnesota in January.

Change is good – except it isn’t, really

I know that Google bumps up sites that keep their content fresh, but if you had to choose between a site with a blog that’s updated weekly and a site with a killer purchase path that hasn’t been changed in three years, what would you choose?

I know what I’d choose. I’d choose to be like this organization I know that hasn’t changed its website in seven years.

How do I know this? The last time it was done I did it, and I know my own work.

What’s happened in the interregnum? The company has solidified its hold on the top spot in its market. It’s converted more and more customers of all sizes, and it’s remained at the top of the search listings without lifting a finger. The only reason it’s changing up the site is that there are fewer and fewer people who know how to work the CMS.

None of this is an argument for not doing content. However, it is a commercial for making sure your website does a great job at the things you really need it to do – generating leads, selling products, recruiting a sales force, nailing keywords, whatever – before augmenting that with content.

And not just content – content that sells, that steers people back into the Venus flytrap parts of your website, the parts with the real stickum that people can’t escape.

(Okay, maybe I was a bit aggressive with the metaphor. Sorry.)

Plus, there’s that thing that Neil Patel noted, that the people you want to consume your content aren’t. That plays a role, too.

So can you love content marketing even if it doesn’t work? Sure. I could say the same thing about my son, and I love him.

Yes, go out there and blog and video and social yourselves silly. Be the magazines that aren’t around to be magazines anymore. Just don’t expect it to sell for you.

Because it can’t.

(But this can: If you like the way we approach marketing, contact us for a quote. In case you haven’t figured it out, we’re not like everybody else.)

Content Marketing Is An Abject Failure That Everyone Keeps Doing