Success comes from more than a few random blog posts & tweets
Target audience: Businesses, brands, digital marketers, advertising agencies, SEO specialists, entrepreneurs, Web publishers, email specialists
Post by Megan Totka
ChamberofCommerce.com
Content marketing can be a challenge to master. The Internet – and people’s interest in what’s on the Internet – is constantly changing, and if your content marketing strategy is not keeping up with the change, your content will be left in the dust.
If you’re not sure why your content seems to be falling flat in performance, here are four of the top reasons why content marketing campaigns fail and what you can do to get back on track.
You have no content strategy
Being successful at content marketing takes more than one or two blog posts a month and an idle Twitter feed. Sure, keeping your blog, website, and social media active are great steps to improving your content marketing, but that’s not all.
Great content marketing needs strategy, planning, and maintenance throughout. The content you create should have a purpose. If you don’t have a plan and goals for your content, you’re going to lack aim, purpose, and overall effectiveness of your content.
How do you fix this?
Create a content strategy. Take a step back and look at the bigger picture. What do you want to accomplish, what are you goals, and how can you achieve those goals? What questions or problems do your customers face, and how can you answer them? Asking these simple questions can get you on track for creating a content strategy that will give meaning to all the content you produce, how much you produce, and the quality,
Make sure you’re setting yourself up for success and making use of the best content marketing tools available to you. With the right tools, the right team, and the right strategy, your content marketing will be on the fast track to success.
You aren’t targeting your audience
Another reason your content marketing might be failing is because it’s not reaching the right audience. Your audience is your customer base – the people you are selling your products and services to and targeting for leads and website visits. They want to see personalized content that speaks to them. Writing generic content is not going to return the engagement results you want to see. Research says you have about 15 seconds at most to catch your readers’ attention before they move on. If you’re not serving the right message at the right time, chances are you will lose your reader. It’s all about knowing your audience and writing personalized content designed to catch and keep their attention.
How do you fix this?
Get to know your customer. Customer relationship management (CRM) software can be highly effective in gathering existing customer data that you can use to craft an accurate buyer persona, enabling you to truly get to know your customers better. When you know exactly what you customer wants, what their needs, pain points, and biggest problems are, you can offer them solutions targeted with such accuracy that they immediately know you can solve their problem.
This goes for the content you produce as much as the services or products you offer. Writing content that targets a very specific audience will capture the attention of the right people, bringing engagement with your content into the hands of the people you most want to turn into customer.
Your social media strategy is lacking
Producing the content is only one part of the equation. When you’re creating great content, but not promoting it, the results are always going to be the same – little to no engagement. Your content marketing strategy and social media strategy should go hand-in-hand, playing off each other and adjusting as needed. The goal is to make your content available to as many people as possible, especially your target audience.
How do you fix this?
Try some of these methods to increase the reach of your content:
- Tweet and retweet the link multiple times over the course of a few days to keep it on your followers’ timelines.
- Schedule your content to be posted on Facebook – use unique introductions and summaries in each different post to keep it engaging.
- Post to ALL social media sites including LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, and other sites you may have. The more posts, the larger your audience.
- Include social share buttons on the page and encourage your readers to share if they enjoyed the content.
Promotion is often a key missing link in well-performing content. The simple “write it and they will read it” mentality will not suffice in the content marketing world. You must write it and then tell everyone you wrote it – and only then will the likes, shares, and engagements roll in.
You’re not tracking your content
Once you release your content out into the world, it is essential that you monitor it. Monitoring the performance of your content means you will be able to tweak your strategy when things are working particularly well. Is that one blog post getting hundreds of shares on Facebook? Great, you can write more content like that. Likewise with poorly performing content – if you keep producing content that isn’t performing well, you won’t make any progress.
How do you fix this?
Content tracking tools are perfect for keeping an eye on the performance of your content. Tools like Google Analytics or BuzzSumo can tell you which content is the top performing on any site. With this information, you can adjust your strategy and design more content that fits the parameters of your best-performing pieces. Google Analytics can take your content tracking to the next level when you integrate any customer relationship management software you have, allowing you to use your data more effectively. You’re be able to see which content is bringing in leads to your website or converting visitors to customers. Using content tracking tools effectively will not only help you strengthen your content strategy, but will also give you valuable insight into how your content is affecting your leads and conversions.
Content marketing is a constantly changing, evolving, and driving force in today’s online world.
These four common problem areas are the first steps in revamping your content marketing into a successful campaign.
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