I saw an article on my Twitter feed this morning, and just had to read it. It was well worth it, I’ll be getting weeks worth of quick posts out of it.
Ann Gynn over at Content Marketing Institute put together a collection of 38 Experts [Sharing] the Worst Content Marketing Advice.
What a gold mine! I’ve heard almost every one of these from clients. I’ve heard almost every one of them from a single client. (Needless to say, that client is not with me anymore). The original article is written for marketing people, so there’s no explanation as to why the advice is bad–we know why it’s bad. I’m going to take a few (dozen) posts to explain it to those who don’t have a marketing background.
Don’t write it down
We don’t need to create a content marketing strategy. Our president (vice president of business development) has it in his/her head. He/she tells us who to target and what to write. – Achinta Mitra, president, Tiecas Inc.
I ran into this within the last year. I was brought in by a client with a successful, long-lived product. They were looking to launch a new product and wanted to do some marketing (they’d never needed to before). I spent two weeks asking for information, insight, and the tools needed to formulate a good marketing plan. The answer I heard more often than any other was “You don’t need to know that”. It was slightly more frequent than “Don’t ask the employees questions”.
Writing down your marketing plan is essential. Sharing it with the entire team equally important. It puts everyone on the same page and allows for comments, questions, and even criticisms. Marketing is not something done by one person in an office down the hall. It’s integrated into your entire business. Your Marketing Director may take the lead, but their decisions need to be based on feedback from customers, CSRs, designers. engineers, clerks, and people on the production line.
If nobody knows where you’re going, they can’t help correct course if things start going wrong.

Blaze is the founder of Redleaf Consulting. He started as a dishwasher at the age of 15, and worked his way up to Director of Marketing for a Sino-German joint venture in Jiangsu, China. He has over 25 years of experience in education, communication, and marketing.