What marketers often miss is that the whole purpose of content is to convey a brands values, messages, and actions  in one word, its personality  to its target audience. Todays consumers seek a high-level of engagement with the brands that they like.

This means that content types and subject matter can vary from company to company. In fact, no two companies can ever be the same. Each have their own story, culture, and set of visions and objectives. So how can you expect a single strategy to work for more than one company? This type of cloning doesnt make sense, nor does it show results. What it does is kill peoples faith in content marketing. No wonder marketers respond with, Oh, that thing doesnt work. Weve tried that.

One of the most frustrating things I hear from businesses who are adopting content marketing as a promotional strategy is that they feel the need to follow a formula laid out by some so-called expert  as if publishing exactly three blog posts a week, releasing one infographic a month and sharing them all on a few specific social networks will guarantee traffic and conversions.

Lets imagine a situation: a brand with a strong online and social media presence gets more sales through its ecommerce site rather than its brick-and-mortar store. Its rival brand is relatively less active online but garners more offline sales. Now, just because both the brands belong to the same industry, do you think they need to follow the same content marketing formula? Not really. But, more often than not, this is what happens. Brands follow some pre-set formula and hope to taste success with content marketing. Its not surprising that these brands fail even before they have the chance to implement the strategy to its fullest.

Heres the truth: one of the worst pieces of advice for marketers is that there is a formula for successful content marketing. I know, for many of you out there, this doesnt sound right and you might be preparing to personally slaughter me. But before you do thathear me out.