Your Human Nature Stops You From Being A Good Content Marketer

The answer of WHY you felt so happy when you were 7, was sharing some sweets with your school buddies was that it was fun. You saw them smiling and happy you shared. This feeling is always there, even for the aggressive instructor in karate class after you master a defence move. So it is not new, to share and feel cool about it. Yet when it comes to business we think different.

Sally runs a small creative agency in Riyadh and she has couple of clients. She realises it is not easy to retain them and to acquire new ones is even harder. Like any young agency she runs social media accounts and a website for her business, but she is not happy with the way things work. she is doing her best trying harder everyday to do magic and get business from the internet, but no luck . I looked at her web presence and I realised that she does the same as everyone else, but nothing no sales from internet. She doesn’t have budget for advertising online, and she still needs to make more business to stay afloat. Let’s check what she knows and how did she come to this business. she studied art and design in Riyadh and she is very smart. BEfore starting her own agency, she worked on different good projects with agencies and other social initiatives, so she is very skilled but she can’t get more clients from the internet. In advertising and creative industry it is all about showing more than telling, and she knows that as she shares her work samples and announcements of delivered projects. She doesn’t know though that most the of the successful agencies online which are not many by the way. They publish ideas , tutorials, and some cool self learning (DIY) based topics for those who like creative and advertising. More than 50 % of their published content online is tutorials and templates for people to design things faster. For her this is a big no no because she will not share her experience for free as this is the reason she opened the agency right ? to utilise her skills and expertise to make money. This reasonable, but humans aren’t trained for this. We hold the baby’s hand to first walk, we keep repeating same word everyday like crazy for babies to learn to talk. Nothing happens because of reflection. It all needs a leading move. It is the same human nature though that is against this when it comes to business as greed controls us without us feeling it. While she NEEDS to share how to design a banner to be trusted as a good resource for designing banners, yet she doesn’t do it out of selfishness and greed. She doesn’t want to giveaway her skills for free ! don’t be shocked. I do the same when I lose focus on my long term objectives in anything I do. When people ask me about marketing insights or ideas on Saudi Arabia, I sometime think why should i tell them for free I can get charged for that. The marketing agencies of different types and service streams, most of them still do the same. They don’t share knowledge because they think it will stop people from working with them as they will learn to do it by themselves. I have met a management consultant in dubai few weeks back and he expressed the same when I asked him why don’t you share more good content with your prospects and leads. He said “ If I tell them how to do things better why would they need me ! “ 

Loyalty and trust come from repeated encounters of questions and answers. Why do we trust Google so much today .. why do we ask the university professor more than the high school teacher for more trusted views on a topic.. all these ideas lead to the conclusion we all try to avoid. If you share more you become more trusted as a source of knowledge and as an authority over your peers and competition, if that makes you feel better 🙂 .

The reason we don’t like to do this is our nature as humans, because greed and ego takes us too far from the truth. This applies on marketing and many other streams in life. So share more, and enjoy it the same as you used to do when you were 7 sharing the sweets.

Do you remember last situation you stopped sharing because you thought it was too much and would stop you from getting business?