What is ‘content marketing’ to you? Ever wondered why it did not work for you?
Content marketing, now, is an umbrella term for everything related to content; from blog to social media updates; from images to video. So, even if you succeed in any one or a few of these and fail in one, your overall effort might be considered as a failure as a whole.
In this article, we will let you go through some factors that might be the reason for your content marketing failure.
9 reasons why your content marketing fails:
1. You don’t know what you want to achieve: As mentioned earlier, content marketing has different segments. You may try all of them, but have you ever thought why you should be doing all these? What is your goal from all these channels?
It may differ from one business to another, but content marketing must have a definite goal. The top 3 goals for B2B and B2C content marketing are brand awareness, lead generation, and engagement. Choose wisely when it comes to your business.
This is the stepping stone for your content marketing success. If you set it right, half the job is done.
2. You think any topic is good for you: Since you are a content creator, you see opportunity at every window. Isn’t it? But this is not the right strategy for a successful content marketing. You need to think about your target audience and their preferences.
For example, if you own a shoe store your content bucket should include posts about your products. You want to touch the broader content area like lifestyle, that's fine! But don't forget about content that is in sync with your products or services. Let’s look at an example.
3. You believe all platforms would fit your bill: This is actually not the case. There are many channels to share your content online. You must not try all of them, else you will fail big time. Choose what is best for your business.
Social media, website articles, emails, and blog are the top performing content that would work both for B2B and B2C. When you would choose one channel, make sure you are clear about your expectations from them and accordingly strategize your activities.
4. You think SEO is dead: Many content marketers believe that SEO is obsolete, as far as content marketing is concerned. But that’s not true. Google still handles more over 6 billion search queries everyday, 100 billion search every month and 1.2 trillion searches every year. And these numbers are gradually increasing.
Moreover, when people search on Google, they’re more likely to make a purchase decision. That may not be the case for users who're hanging out on different social media channels. For this reason, it’s very necessary to optimize your content for search engines.
5. You don’t have the community ready: You have created excellent content, but are you ready to drive maximum attention out of it? Let us ask the question in a more direct way. Have you built the right community for your content marketing? Remember, without a strong community, your great content might just go unnoticed.
If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap
— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014
A strong community never fails to amplify the reach of a great content. Look at the famous tweet. Had Ellen DeGeneres ever thought that she was going to set a trend while clicking this selfie? She could easily give the credit to her amazing follower-base on the platform.
6. Your content looks like an ad: Stop creating ads in the name of content. Your audience does not want to read promotional content, while they’re out for an information, or product review, or service, or simply for entertainment.
7. You don’t check analytics: Whenever you’re trying a channel to give your content an extra push, make sure you keep a track on the analytics for each channel. For instance, if you post a content on Facebook, you must see how it performs, in terms of your marketing goal.
Choose the analytics tools for each channel effectively. If you want to monitor clicks on your blog posts and articles, tools like Bitly would help you. For Facebook marketing, tools like Facebook Insights and Fanpage Karma are good. For Twitter, there is Twitter Analytics. Look back at these analytics dashboards at a regular interval, so you can measure your performance.
8. You publish the content and sit back: What do you do after you hit the ‘publish’ button? Here are your 2 choices, 1. You think your job is done here & 2. You start distributing your content across the channels. If you choose #1, you are making the deadliest content marketing mistake ever.
In fact, you job, as a content marketer, starts only after your content goes live. Make a strategy for content promotion beforehand based on the content type. For example, if you create an eBook, your promotional strategy must be different from that of a blog post or a social media post.
For a successful content marketer, it’s very necessary to invest. The perfect example, in this category, would be the famous Oreo tweet. Would you believe us, if we say that Oreo posted the tweet as an ad?
9. You gave up too early: Successful content marketing requires its due course to show results. It’s a long process, starting from identifying your buyer journey from converting them into your loyal customers. Moz’s Rand Fishkin shows how content marketing really works with the simple graph.
He also elaborates that 0.1% of successful content marketing always looks like overnight success. However, they are all the result of hundreds of days’ hard work, patience, and an ardent eagerness to deliver excellence.
Here're 40 content marketing stats that marketers shouldn't miss in 2015.
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