Content marketing: 7 ways to fail and 4 principles for success

Where content marketing began

Content marketing was born in 1895, in the United States of course, which are always ahead on these things. It all starts with tractors. Instead of a catalogue, John Deere had a magazine, The Furrow, distributed to farms and farmers. It is still published today.

The same thing happened in Europe with the Michelin Guide: from 1900 it was given to very wealthy customers with the aim of getting them to change their tyres. That is how restaurant stars were born: you live in London, you take a trip to Edinburgh to try the starred restaurant listed in the guide, you wear out your tyres and you replace them with a new set of Michelins. And Red Bull's The Red Bulletin, printed language by language, country by country, is the king of content marketing today.

As an SME you couldn't do what the multinationals did, because the barrier to entry was too high. Today there is the internet, which lets you produce content of the highest quality to spread and reinforce your brand positioning, generating leads, on a relatively modest budget.

I show off and I take your email

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable content to attract a clearly defined target audience, with the aim of guiding it towards a predetermined action. Technically this action is called a call to action; very often in small and medium-sized businesses there isn't one, and then you are just publishing, which sends customers to the richer, better-organised companies.

There must always be a mix of “showing off” and “taking your email”, otherwise it's just publishing.

The basic strategy is to create and own your media instead of renting them, that is, buying space in print, on radio or on television. The blog is your own container, it's an asset. Online, you can't hand everything over to Facebook: if Facebook went into crisis, would you want to lose all your content? With the social networks changing their algorithm every year and advertising costing 20% more every twelve months, this point matters even more today than when I wrote it.

In class I put it this way: if a war breaks out tomorrow and hackers take Facebook down, I have the blog and I have the email list. The next day I send an email to my sixty thousand contacts and carry on selling. Whoever built everything on their page has nothing left that day.

Content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and interested contacts without selling. You have to stimulate demand without saying “come and buy today because there's a discount”, otherwise the customer realises you need to sell. And once the customer realises you need to sell, you've had it, because you are forced to sell on their terms. Instead you have to sell on your terms, and they have to buy on your terms, and thank you at the end.

Without a call to action and without collecting the customer's contact details, I am only publishing, and I don't have the data. For every piece of content I offer, I ask for an email. The blog does the SEO, and every article becomes an email sent to the list as soon as it is published; alongside it, the automated emails triggered by the contact's point of entry, with a journey that in luxury has to last months and years.

The objectives

Our general objectives are quickly stated. The first is spreading brand awareness: anyone who says brand awareness is useless is wrong. If nobody knows me, who is going to give me €50,000 for a kitchen? Nobody. The second is acquiring new contacts, together with keeping existing customers. The third is demonstrating leadership in the sector: go to one of my competitors' websites, and then to ours; the difference is obvious and helps build a high-end image in people's minds. The last is driving traffic to the website.

Seven ways to fail

1. Not trusting your own abilities: writing, video, photography, audio.
2. Being afraid of failure or of what others think. Don't care, because you only live once and you can't worry about what other people think.
3. Setting the bar too low.
4. Leaving out the call to action.
5. Focusing on a single distribution channel: if one channel goes down, you go down with it.
6. Being slow and missing deadlines. The world moves fast: if you have to make three or four videos a month, you have to produce them. The year has twelve months; skip three and you lose continuity, and the worst thing is for your customer to see you as struggling. Even if you are, you must let customers and competitors understand that you are in a growth phase. The worst thing for an entrepreneur is to go to market to sell when nobody wants to buy.
7. Not being consistent over time. You produce content for three months and see it isn't getting results? Don't stop. Do it for at least three years and then judge whether it works.

Four principles for success

1. Meet a need: answer the unspoken questions of your target contacts.
2. Be consistent.
3. Be human. The blog has to be written in the first person, something never seen in premium companies. The website copy should be in the third person, but the blog copy must be in the first person. This article is written that way too.
4. Have a point of view. We are not Wikipedia: we have to take positions in line with the brand's image. We don't make laminate kitchens because laminate is plastic, and we wrote an article that disqualifies the material and the competitors who use it, to attract target customers.

An up-to-date blog is also a sign of life. If a customer is looking for a designer kitchen they will look at three or four competitors online: one of mine hasn't updated its blog since 2012. The customer will think it has closed down. And business is a matter of perception.

From my book Direct from Milano and my classroom courses. Figures and examples updated to September 2026.