There’s a lot of “common wisdom” out there when it comes to marketing, but not all those seemingly foolproof strategies will work for your small business or start-up. There are some hard-and-fast marketing rules that it’s actually okay to break – if you do it in the right way!
Many experts will tell you that you need a content marketing strategy. But what does that really mean? Should you lay out your marketing plan in a calender before you launch your business? Of course not! Marketing strategy takes a lot of time and money, and if your business is just getting off the ground you have no way of knowing which practices will work for you. You could spend a lot of resources on a strategy only to discover that it doesn’t work with your audience! No, your marketing strategy should be reactive: you’ll try something that should work, and adapt accordingly when it fails or when it succeeds.
People will also tell you that storytelling is key to modern marketing. While it does work for many businesses, is it right for yours? You can often have just as much success with list formats: look at the incredible success of BuzzFeed’s lists! Modern readers on the internet respond to this format more than big blocks of storytelling text!
For more on which marketing rules it’s okay to break, check out this great article: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/09/25/content-marketing-best-practices
