More marketers are spending time, money and resources on content marketing than ever before. In fact, 42 percent of businesses now publish new content at least weekly. However, the majority of these efforts continue to fail. Why is this? While the reasons are wide-ranging, I see some mistakes happening over and over again:

I’ll admit it. Before I started my own marketing firm, I worked in other advertising and PR firms and often hated what we produced: pithy, uppity ads that sounded super clever and trendy, like a bunch of skinny, uber-hipster millennials wearing tight jeans and thick-rimmed glasses came up with them while drinking their fifth nonfat soy green-tea lattes and smirking ironically. I think this actually happened. A lot.

To me the ads, brochures, taglines, marketing “collateral” and other “stuff” we produced seemed vapid and clever for the sake of being clever — like we were trying to impress ourselves and other marketing people. Plain language, simplicity and directness were dismissed for their lack of creativity and artistic flair.

How many times have you heard that no one reads anything longer than a 140-character tweet anymore? That our attention spans are shot due to digital information overload, multi-tasking and multi-channeling? That if you create anything longer than 200 words or 30 seconds no one will pay any attention to it? Soundbites! “Snackable” content! Tweets!

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. (Well, except for the attention-span thing.)

While technology has certainly changed the way we think and process information, people still desire substantial information. They just consume it differently. In fact, due to the overwhelming glut of content available on the Internet today, Internet users are becoming more discerning about the content they consume, searching and scanning for content that’s worth their attention and time, and engaging more heavily with valuable, lengthy content. And in the online world — where everyone can be a publisher — the way to distinguish yourself is by producing an outstanding piece of substantial content that stands out from the rest.

How content marketing can fuel employee learning and development

I have always been an insatiable learner. I was a big reader as a child and now as a professional, it’s almost overwhelming the amount of books, blogs and articles that I want to read. But as I’ve gotten busier, like most people, reading has fallen by the wayside, with books piled up on my nightstand that I never quite get to.

However, I continue to learn and stay at the cutting edge of my industry. How? Content marketing. My agency is committed to writing and speaking about marketing and public relations topics, and thus I continually read and conduct research to ensure my blog posts and presentations are accurate, comprehensive and up to date.