Content is king, but content is just about everywhere and people love consuming it! It should come as no surprise that content is at the hub of nearly all marketing strategies, with close to 94% of small companies concentrating their efforts on content marketing. Having said that, with almost all companies now centralising their marketing campaigns on content, it’s becoming significantly more complex to stand out from the crowd and make your content marketing appealing and powerful.
Have you attempted content marketing only to find that you’re not getting the intended outcomes? Well, you’re undoubtedly one of many organisations that are in the same boat. Don’t give up though, there’s no question that content marketing is among the most useful ways of growing your customer base. So, here are 4 reasons why your content marketing might not be performing and importantly, ways to fix them!
You don’t have a strategy
Like any investment, if you don’t have a strategy and established KPIs to quantify results, how can you possibly improve? Publishing blogs and sending tweets are fine, but if you don’t have any end goals then you’re simply aiming in the dark. For you to generate meaningful content that viewers will engage with, you must have a clearly-defined strategy that should align with your business objectives.
Whether you want to improve brand awareness, website traffic, or conversion rates, your strategy should incorporate KPIs coupled with short-term and long-term goals. These marketing goals should complement your business goals so you have a clear understanding of your audience, the purpose of your content, and the kind of content that will work best for you.
Your content is not distinct
With the sheer amount of online companies today, it’s imperative that your content is distinct from others. Too many businesses will develop content without examining the competition and subsequently design content that merely gets lost in the crowd. Your content should be entertaining, enjoyable, and most importantly, deliver value to your audience by offering solutions to typical pain-points in your niche. Alongside this, different kinds of content suit different communication approaches, so consider the best ways you can achieve this, either through infographics, videos, diagrams, or even just thought-provoking or exciting text.
You don’t advertise your content
One of the greatest errors that small companies make with their content marketing is that they don’t actually market it! Even if you’ve constructed the most ground-breaking article the planet has ever seen, who will see it if they have no idea it exists? For you to prevail with your content marketing, it’s integral that you advertise your content through all available avenues, including:
- Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Google+).
- Email newsletters.
- Adding internal links to your articles.
- Pitching to influencers and bloggers in your niche.
- Submitting it as a guest post to bloggers in your sector.
- Including links to your content when commenting on other forums and blogs.
Your content is not search engine friendly.
Content constitutes a substantial portion of your SEO, so it’s vital that your content is SEO friendly and never use black hat tactics to attempt to enhance results. Keyword stuffing is a typical mistake that businesses will make in their content creation, along with using the wrong keywords, duplicate content, and not optimising meta tags.
Undertake some groundwork to discover the most appropriate keywords that your target market would use to find your content. At the same time, use meta tags to your strengths to draw more viewers to your blog. Search engines always intend to deliver the best content to users, so if your content is engaging then other sites will link to it, increasing the prospects of achieving more high-quality, reliable links from relevant businesses.
At the end of the day, there could be thousands of reasons why your content marketing isn’t delivering you the intended results, however the aforementioned recommendations should cover the majority of them. If you’re intending to invest in content marketing, you can’t do it half-heartedly. Perform as much research as you can about your audience, your competitors, and your keywords, and craft interesting content that your viewers will naturally engage with.
Source: Internet Marketing Experts
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