Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Brian shares a content marketing experience he had with a big company and why things went wrong.

Transcription

Content marketing horror story.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

Let’s talk about content marketing and a very specific horror story that I had.

So, it this is, this is not uncommon when you’re dealing with larger brands. But it’s something that can happen to you even if you’re a smaller brand. If you’re not a household name, I was working with a company that was a house, well, it is a household name, they are legendary. If I told you it’s a one-word company, if I told you their name, you’d know who they are and what they do.

You can find their name plastered somewhere on my website with companies that I’ve worked with. But this particular scenario was one of those just horrible situations because this was quite a few years back and they had a Facebook feed.

I don’t know if they’re still doing this but they had a Facebook feed that had about 20 to 30 posts a day. And so there were just constant posts going through their Facebook page and it was a major thing.

They have millions of people following them on Facebook and this was before Facebook was really tamping down and keeping things from getting out there unless you bought ads, and so forth.

So that a lot of this stuff was getting out to people. But it wasn’t getting a whole lot of attention. Not a whole lot of love back not a whole lot of likes. I mean, for the number of people that were seeing it, you had very few likes, very few comments.

And the real problem is most of it was commercials. It was just one commercial after another all day long through their Facebook feed, just pumping stuff garbage out, they’re not good commercials, not good stuff that is really attracting attention.

This is just fluff, just garbage brand stuff as if they needed any more hardcore branding, what they needed is value.

They needed something entertainment, anything. But it was horrible. It was bad.

So we were helping a certain division to get more attention and so there was this whole idea that they were going to be an interview on a podcast that I was representing, that they were going to do an interview and we were going to go in and promote it through their Facebook page, just once a major deal.

There was going to be a giveaway with gas cards and all this other stuff was a great big, broad thing that did not have much direction. I told everyone early on, I said I don’t see this going anywhere because we’re talking about getting one post out of you know, 20, 30 posts a day.

I don’t see this getting a whole lot of attention. Unless we’re putting hands behind it even back then I could see that we needed to be putting more oomph behind it.

Yeah, but we got millions of followers, this is going to get tons of attention.

Wow. Okay, but I don’t see this happening.

And sure enough, this thing popped up just like everything that pops up in their feed. And it got taken over by the next thing that popped up in a few hours and that was it.

That was the end of it. There was nothing else. It was horrible.

There were views, there were likes. Not many comments. Nobody participated.

If there were people that participate there were not very many people participating in the contest that was attached to it. It achieved nothing.

And I wasn’t the only one working on it, there was multiple people working on this project. There was a side company that I had, how this is how I had been introduced to the brand, which was still a client of mine.

And we were they were kind of designing a lot of this and I was telling him early on what was going to occur.

It went worse than I even thought it was horrible. It was weeks and weeks and weeks down the drain. Because of bad planning, because people not looking at the big picture and really understanding what they’re doing.

So before you commit to putting a whole lot of effort, time, and money into a project through content marketing, whatever format you have, number one, have it be long term.

Have it be something that’s going to take, take time to put together don’t have it be a one and done thing. You’re quite oftentimes going to be disappointed.

Having a long-term strategy for getting there, that’s the main thing. And then put people in charge that know what they’re doing. And just because a large company has people who are getting paid large checks doesn’t mean that they know what they’re doing.

If they can show you a process that they’ve already done over and over again, if they don’t have a system, then chances are, they’re just getting their paycheck and moving on.

And if they don’t have a whole lot to benefit off of it, they probably won’t put a whole lot of effort behind it. That isn’t the only horror story I’ve been through via content marketing, but it is the one that typifies the attitude that I’ve gotten from large corporate companies.

Which is why I tend to like to work with medium to large-sized companies, I like to work with people that are in the process of taking a successful situation they already had and moving it, adding content marketing, adding a content marketing system into what they’re already doing.

Those are the people I like partnering up with nowadays. If you think that you or the company you’re working with and you’d like to talk with me, I don’t have a I have a pretty tight schedule right now, but I wouldn’t mind chatting with you.

First things first, check out my book. This is I have all my clients run through this. The reason why is it doesn’t take long to look through it. I mean, just look through the thing and see if we’re even going to click, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Of Your Business.

It’s all about defeating competition by having a very large, broad based strategy for your content marketing. Get a Free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

We’ll be back here tomorrow night.

Hopefully, I won’t scare you too much then. Hopefully, you’ll be able to sleep well tonight. Have a good one.

Get out there and let the magic happen.