Do any of these apply to you?

• You want to make sure your business continues to sell low numbers of products.
• Your sales people complain they have no leads to pursue.
• You always have time to finish your latest report at the conferences you attend because no one visits your booth.

If so, then you must be a software company that wants to keep doing the same boring things when it comes to your content marketing too, right?  Then this post is for you.

Here are the nine things you SHOULDN’T be doing with your content marketing.

Don’t Tell a Story

Telling the story about how your product solved one of your client’s problem takes up too many pages of a case study. Readers don’t want to hear how your product saved them $1 million last year.

Talk About the Same Things Your Competitors Are Talking About

Repeat the same story as your competitors, only replace their name with yours in the story. If you’ve got some writers on staff, get them to recreate the content using your information, but keep the topic EXACTLY the same.

Explain How Your Bigger Competitors Have More of the Market Share

Use an infographic to show how your market share is so much smaller than your competitors.

Never Put a Human Face on Any of Your Content

You only hired a social media team because the company president wanted it. Don’t let them put their names on any tweets or blog posts. All content should come from the company, and not the people who work here.

Use Lots of Jargon

Everyone understands you when you talk about flux capacitors and plasma induction coils, so be sure to pepper your content with as much jargon as you can. After all, you’re speaking to people who already understand you, right?

Keep Talking About the Same Topics Over and Over

Re-purposing content is one of the main ideas of content marketing, so sticking to this tactic will get more readers.

A Call to Action Is For Direct Marketing Only, Not Content Marketing

You’re just trying to get your information out there, so there’s no need to put any calls to action in the content. You want them to read, not call in for a sample or demo. Sales people will call them to book those.

All Product Information Should Contain the Main Functional Information

Your product is only used for the reasons you designed it for, and see no need to try and find other applications for it. So your content only talks about the plain functions of the software, that’s it. There’s never anything more that you want to talk about, or any benefits you want to highlight.

Give Up and Continue to Pursue the Same Path

Keep using the same number of content marketing tactics. No need to measure how your CM strategy is going, as you’re not going to change it. “This is the way we’ve always done it” is your mantra, and you’re sticking to it.

Okay, I’ve got a confession to make.

This post should be read in Bizarro Superman world, where you do the OPPOSITE of what I say.

Use Lots of Jargon should really read DON’T Use Lots of Jargon.

Never Put a Human Face on Any of Your Content should read PUT a Human Face on ALL Your Content.

If you seriously implemented all nine of these things as-is, you’d be out of business in no time! 🙂

But if you want to influence your readers, and inspire them to action by creating quality content, then just do the opposite of these things. And if I wrote them so well (or badly, *smile*) that you can’t figure out what the opposite is, then click on over to read the infographic that inspired this post. You’ll find these and other ideas on how to create content that readers crave.