I believe that a content marketing strategy can help any organization grow and prosper, but it takes more than a list of tips and platitudes to make it work. It requires a shift in perspective. If you’re a stakeholder or a consultant, it often requires persuasion and—worst of all—patience.

Most of us who have started or want to start our own businesses lack patience. We see how things could be improved and feel frustrated by how slowly things change.  When we finally strike out on our own, we want clients to hire us because of our expertise and then get out of the way. “Just let me take care of it,” we say, and when a client like that comes along, you never want them to leave.

Most of the time, it doesn’t happen that way. They’re the customer, remember? They’re spending a lot of money. (We hope.) They usually want to be involved in the process. Oh my god, they might even have ideas! What I’ve come to realize is that content marketing in theory is easy. Most people don’t need a consultant to tell them that offering great content is a better marketing strategy than offering lousy content. They hire a consultant to help them move forward, make progress and realize results. So what distinguishes content marketing consultants isn’t whether they have tips for making your blog better. What makes consultants different is whether they can work with clients who have different ideas about what content marketing means to them, especially in the context of their particular work environment.

To build on yesterday’s post, I’m not impressed by a lot of the content produced by content marketers. It’s written to attract a general audience. It perpetuates the idea that content marketing is more about delivery tools (Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn) than the content itself. I hope that’s something that will change.