Are brands wasting millions on content?

When I worked in police intelligence, there was a saying that my boss used, “Kilos of cocaine can come into the city each night and no one would know or care. But if a
shed gets broken into, the victim tells everyone they know.”

His point was that while working on catching drug gangs made us feel like we were in Miami Vice, people cared more if their fishing tackle was stolen.

Content is a little like that. It’s a glamorous world we all love to work in, but while we all care about it, most consumers don’t. And you’re probably wasting a lot of cash trying to communicate with people who are actively not interested in anything you have to say.

Content marketing vs content SEO

Long before the likes of Mr Beast and the Paul brothers arrived with their mega followings along with Beast Burgers and Prime drinks. The idea of content was largely fuelled by the SaaS world.

The traffic growth of companies like Hubspot, along with their revenue, caused everyone to adopt the model of traffic + conversion = sales. Of course, this was overly simplistic, meaning marketers pivoted into a nurture model and building email lists to collect MQLs became a juicy metric: “Look, boss, we have 10,000 email subscribers.”

Eventually, if you follow this path long enough, marketers were forced to move content through the efficiency model of ROI, or, if you’re going to create content, you need to maximise every penny it costs you.

Ultimately, we saw the emergence of ‘growth marketers’ who realised that brand-created content rarely lasted beyond a few days in views. But, if you leveraged search engines, you could create content, rank it, and sit back as you developed an ever-increasing amount of traffic, some of which signed up for an ebook download.

And so, as the compound effect fairy tale goes. Brands lived happily ever after.

Except they didn’t.

Content for SEO is not working

Many brands adopting the content for search model suffer the same problems: lots of traffic and email subscribers, but slow to no conversions.

This is because SEO targets keywords and the vast amount of keywords used by humans are informational. In simple terms, we don’t know something, so we search for information. The mistake is thinking you need to capture all informational traffic relating to your category

When I examine website traffic, I look for commercial intent. Because that’s where the money is. We’re trying to reach those ‘in the market’ for what you sell. But most people consume little content before purchase.

If I need new windows for my house, I’m not reading countless blog articles about windows. If we’re looking for new HR software, I’m not searching for HR tips. And yet I can guarantee they’ll be a HR software company online trying to rank for terms like “the importance of teamwork” or “what is a probation period?”.

‘The first rule of using AI for content? Don’t tell anyone you’re using AI for content’Most content in SEO is like this. It targets those out of market to buy what you sell in exchange for a single metric: traffic. But it’s a meaningless metric, filled with visitors who arrive with a fleeting informational need and forget you exist the moment they leave your site.

In contrast, the best SEO content targets buyers. People with problems you solve are searching for either a ready-made solution (what you sell) or information about their problems. Either way, these are the sweet spots for content for SEO.

The problem is that this approach has limited search, which means your traffic graph will be harder to grow. And marketers don’t like harder.

Demand generation is a myth

According to demand gen specialists, if I set up a Christmas tree website, I should be able to create demand year-round. Of course, we know that’s not the reality. The same goes for content for SEO.

If the content targets people with zero commercial intent then they don’t have a problem you solve, in other words, you can’t sell to them.

Even if they land on your email list, you can’t sell to them until they enter the market to buy. Every market has limited traffic that is based on market conditions. When you try to go beyond that limit, you are wasting money. Collectively, brands have wasted millions on content like this all in the name of traffic.

What you need to do is ask yourself a simple question: what do buyers search for?

It’s not a trick question. Canva figured out that people who were likely to need to design things had a design problem. So, they created templates. A telehealth company might discover that its customers have embarrassing skin conditions. So, perhaps creating an image database to target image searches makes sense. A national chain of solicitors specialising in divorce might be best served by building a knowledge centre that answers all the most well-known questions about divorce (and those that aren’t).

You get the idea. Focus on your market’s problems and find ways to be present for the keywords they use to solve them. But where does content marketing come into this?

Content marketing is marketing

Once you realise that targeting out-of-market buyers with SEO-driven content is a waste of energy, you can start having some fun again.

The first thing we need to remember is that your prospects are not interested in what you have to say. They don’t want to consume anything you create and aren’t even thinking about you 99.9% of the time. Now we’ve got that out of the way, it’s time for that classic quote from Howard Luck Gossage: “Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.”

So, let’s stick with our aim. Content marketing tells as many people you exist as possible. That’s its point. So, to achieve that, your content must be interesting and gain attention. Be it publicity, webinars, blog articles, newsletters and, of course, social media.

We’re in the business of getting attention, and once we have that attention, we can tell people we exist and the problem we solve. The reason why content marketing works is not that it’s more effective than advertising. It’s not. Nothing does advertising like advertising. It’s just that content marketing is cheap and getting cheaper.

AI search is going to change marketing… are you prepared?By 2026, it is estimated that 90% of all online content will be created by AI. The 10% created by humans will be in the same format: videos, images, text and content. It’s just that the level will be raised. I fully expect AI content creators to become among the most in-demand jobs in marketing.

And like everything, the algorithms will reward what people want to see, and if you grease the palms of the platform gods, you’ll gain more reach. Of course, this won’t beat well-created, broad-reaching advertising designed to build and refresh memory structures and mental associations with a brand. It’s not supposed to.

However, content marketing is a super cheap way to grab consumers’ attention with content that actually interests them. But it’s a volume game. Advertising tends to be single assets that reach a vast number of people who are not in the market to buy.

Content marketing aims to nudge people who are entering the market. It’s cheap, fast-paced, interesting and grabs the attention of those you seek to serve. All in the hope that you might nudge them to purchase what you sell at some point.

So, please. Stop wasting your marketing budgets trying to rank blog posts targeting out of market buyers. It’s a waste.

Traffic is vanity, profit is sanity.