Are you putting a lot of effort into content marketing and not getting good results?
Undoubtedly, content marketing is an effective way to attract more visitors and transform them into customers. Almost every business wants to maximize its ROI, and so they invest a solid amount of time and money into this endeavor.
However, that doesn’t mean success is guaranteed since there are a lot of variables involved. Content marketing can be tricky, but there are a few ways to quickly address poor results.
We've identified five common issues faced by content marketers, as well as quick ways to resolve them. Follow some of the simple solutions below to improve your results and ROI.
1. Not having a strategy:
Many businesses complain that they’ve been working hard on their content, but it's just not paying off. They claim: “We’ve been publishing blogs, promoting content, etc., but we're unable to see results.”
But when asked if they've documented their strategy, the answer usually is “We have a strategy, but it’s not documented.”
This is a critical mistake. Content marketing without a well-devised strategy is not going to return anything. If you want to be successful in your efforts, a dexterous strategy in a documented format is crucial to attaining that.
A strategy is helpful in evaluating the overall performance. It allows you to see what is working for you and what isn’t. It gives you the ability to change elements that don't work well, and allows you to focus on the areas that do work and are giving you the most ROI.
Quick Fix:
Strategy development must be your sole focus to establish a successful foundation. Once you have a concrete strategy that answers preliminary questions and takes into account the broader metrics, you'll have a clear plan that will give you an edge over your competition. That strategy should include:
- The major KPIs (key performance indicators) that you want to achieve. These KPIs will vary and might incude shares, traffic, CTRs, conversions, leads, user engagement etc.
- An answer to questions such as who is your target audience, what goals do you want to accomplish, what content types are the focus, budget estimation, etc.
- It must be coherent with your overall business strategy so an integrated approach can help you meet your overall business goals
- Direction from and endorsement by your company’s leadership. Your marketing agency or in-house marketing team can create the strategy, but it must be blessed by an involved leadership team.
- A plan for who will execute your strategy--again, this can be completed by your in-house team, an agency or freelancers, but you need to be sure you're proactively planning your resource needs and taking resource limitations into account during the planning stage. However, don't limit yourself to a "bare-bones" mentality when planning your strategy; that's a sure-fire way to set youself up for failure if you're knowingly executing a strategy that is not sufficient to get results. Be sure that your plan includes the "ideal state" and try to find creative ways to fill in resource gaps--for example, using a hybrid approach or pulling in extra resources for critical campaigns when necessary.
2. Targeting the wrong audience:
Another common yet critical mistake is being unaware about who the target audience is. While crafting content, the first question that comes to mind should be "Does this address my target audience?" or "Does this fulfill the urgent concerns of my target market?"
If you don’t know who your target audience is and what these ideal prospects want from you, you will be wasting precious time and money. It's absolutely crucial to focus your strategy on the right audience. Address their main needs and problems and provide them with the content and information they truly need.
Quick Fix:
Content marketing aims to transform prospects into successful leads, and this is the driving force behind why businesses need to make the effort. Reaching out to your ideal prospects and getting to know their insights and desires is the key. You can do this via the following steps:
- Start conducting research within your organization before you talk to prospects and customers. Reach out to other departments, and ask relevant questions about leads and customers. For example, ask the sales team for their insights about customers’ interests, problems and the questions they encounter. Sales can be a tremendous source of information.
- Prepare some questionnaires with the help of online tools, and send them to your existing customers and targeted audience as well. Lead with questions related to their basic demographics (like age, location, gender, interests) and then follow up with more specialized questions for more detailed information.
- Social listening is a sound way to learn more about customers’ habits. Research various social networking sites, find out how customers are discussing your brand, where they are most active, their social habits and so on.
- Based on this information, start building personas (or buyers’ profiles). Market research shows that businesses that work on personas achieve 73% higher conversions than those who don’t. There are many persona-building templates online or you can hire an inbound agency such as Flair Interactive to help. In each persona, write a comprehensive description, including their demographics, interests, concerns, goals and preferences to round it out.
3. Producing boring content:
Is your content getting any attention from readers? Has any of it ever gone viral? No?
This is one of the easiest fixes. You won't get any interest or shares if you’re producing content that is boring, is not compelling enough to grab readers' attention and is similar to everyone else's in the niche. If that's true, then it’s guaranteed that you’re not going to acquire potential readers or new audiences that you'd like to convert to customers.
Quick Fix:
The only way to grab readers’ attention and retain it is by creating compelling and distinguishable content. Have content that is truly different from everyone else’s. Great content provokes readers to click through your links and share. Here are some tips to keep in mind when you're creating content:
- Always keep an original and unique brand voice. Produce content where every piece has your own style that makes your voice different from competitors.
- Contests and quizzes are great ways to get users engaged with your brand. Offer an amazing gift to promote interest.
- Add visuals in your content wherever possible. Including images or videos in articles or blog posts that enhance readability. Infographics, videos, presentations and funny images (if they're relevant to your niche) will keep the audience engaged and regularly visiting your blog and social pages.
- Make titles catchy as well. Your title can make or break your content; readers will simply skip over your content if it doesn't have a highly engaging title. Listicles are a great way to engage readers and motivate them to read more.
- Know more about trending topics or buzz-making discussions going on in the online world. Use BuzzSumo to get great insights about trending content related to any topic. Find trending and viral topics and start crafting compelling content about it.
- Produce focused, relevant and in-depth content about a topic. This kind of write-up provides readers with thorough solutions to their problems. They will start relying on your for advice and will follow you to get your expert opinions.
- Write about influencers in your target industry by including their voice about any topic since it adds value. It’ll increase readership, traffic and social shares as people love to know what industry experts have to say, and will provoke them to click through to get experts’ suggestions.
4. Not producing SEO-friendly content:
SEO and content marketing go hand in hand. Content must be optimized to get better results.
If you don't consider SEO as essential or are employing black-hat methods, you won’t be able to get optimal results with your content marketing efforts. Make sure you have the right SEO strategy in place to get the full benefit of content marketing.
Quick Fix:
Do an SEO audit of your web site or blog to determine the areas in which you need to work on. Your SEO audit should include:
- An analysis of target keywords and identification of the right ones that your target customers might use to search content. Google Keywords Planner is a great tool to identify keywords.
- Identification of duplicate content and your plan for removing it. Duplicate content (on your domain or others) can be very detrimental to your rankings.
- Optimization of your content's meta data, particularly title and description. The SERPs show meta title and description with every URL. Although metadata (especially keywords) is not as important to Google algorithms as it was in the past, it’s still really important to craft them meticulously since this is the first information that USERS will see when looking at search engine results. You want to make these highly engaging to encourage them to click through to your site or blog. Follow modern character length recommendations, so they comply with search engine standards.
- Identification of easy technical changes that you can make to make your sites more searchable and attractive to search engines, such as improving page load times and ensuring that your domains are set up correctly
5. Not promoting content:
This last mistake can be a horrendous one. Don't forget the word "marketing" in "content marketing." If you've created epic content that is engaging, SEO-optimized and focused for the target audience but you're not promoting it, you’re not giving it a chance to succced.
If your content is not promoted anywhere, nobody is going to know about it, nobody will read it or share it with others, and it won’t convert.
Content marketing is not merely about producing high-quality content. It’s about creating and promoting that content. This type of promotion should be varied so you can draw more visitors, readers, shares and conversions.
Quick Fix:
Amend your strategy by incorporating promotional tactics and allocate a solid amount of time to it. Here are some ideas for promoting your content to the world:
- Tweet about recent blog posts multiple times. Ask followers to retweet it.
- Share different status updates on Facebook. Use a social media automation tool like Hubspot or Hootsuite to schedule posts in advance.
- Include a link to your latest blog post in your newsletter or email.
- If you have included any influencers, pitch it to them so they will share the post with their circles.
- Ask other bloggers to share your blog posts.
- Embed click-to-tweet statements within your post. This is a sure-fire way to make people share the major highlights of your post.
- Share your content on LinkedIn via your company page, your personal profile and relevant LinkedIn groups.
- Share it on other industry-related blogs, communities and forums.
- Mention your content in your comments on other blogs and web sites. Be sure to do this in a helpful instead of spammy way.
The Bottom Line
Reassessing your content marketing strategy and finding its deficiencies will help you devise a stronger and better approach. If you're making any of the above mistakes, this is the perfect time to come out of your comfort zone and take action accordingly. In the end, you’ll definitely not only have a well-planned content marketing strategy, but you’ll get better results as well in the form of more traffic, leads and customers--and isn’t that what every business wants at the end of the day?
Need help defining your content and inbound marketing strategy? Contact us today so we can help you put together a solid inbound marketing strategic Game Plan!