It's common wisdom among marketers that most long-form content should be, at most, mildly promotional.

The goal is to help the reader or prospect. Then, prospects will gradually come to see the company as expert at solving their problems, and they'll sign up for a demo or reach out for a discovery call. That is how long-form content grows businesses.

But not all marketing content should be nonpromotional. The question is, then, How promotional should each marketing content asset be? How do companies figure out the proper level of promotion across their content marketing mix?

When determining how promotional marketing content should be, consider three principles:

1. The channel
2. The stage of the customer journey to which the asset speaks
3. The overall mix of your company's content.

1. Adapt the marketing content's level of promotion to the channel it appears on

The most common reason editors reject thought leadership bylines is that they are overly promotional. In those cases, companies or their marketing agencies write the byline—which is supposed to be a vendor-neutral op-ed that advances the ideas in an industry—like an ad, and the editor rightly rejects it.

Why? Because the point of an op-ed in a third-party media publication is not to sell a solution; it's to educate readers about industry best-practices. Promotional byline writers have jumped the gun.

The first principle for gauging the appropriate level of self-promotion in marketing content is to adapt your content's level of promotion to a specific channel, or choose a channel for a content asset based on its level of promotion.

• Thought leadership guest bylines should be, at most, minimally promotional.
• Blog posts are owned assets, so they can be as promotional as you like.
• Social media content should be a mix: Some self-promotion is fine, but too much and you'll risk alienating the audience you're striving to build by being helpful.

2. Write marketing content with the customer journey in mind

A common question asked by startup founders and others new to marketing: "Why shouldn't all our content be about us—our solutions, the exact problems we solve, and why we're good at solving them? Isn't the point of marketing content to tell our customers how we can help them?"

Fair questions. The problem is that those questions do not account for multiple stages of the customer journey.

For example, if you have bottom-of-funnel readers who already know they have a specific problem, who are familiar with the solutions available to solve that problem, and who even know you're among the companies that can solve it, explaining why you're the best fit to solve the problem is appropriate. Bottom-of-funnel blog posts that prove your effectiveness, compare you with your competitors, and describe your approach or features are proper ways to speak to the "BoFu" reader.

But what if a prospect has never heard of you? What if you're a contextual advertising company and the prospect doesn't even know what contextual advertising is? Do you want to tell that person why you're so great at contextual advertising, or do you want to educate first about what contextual advertising is and what best-practices are?

When prospects have become interested and basically informed, you can tell them about various solutions and how yours is different.