American Express has been doing content marketing since God-knows-when. Even Domino’s has been boasting about its content marketing success.
So, why aren’t you getting good results from your own efforts?
Because you’re getting some key things wrong.
Below are some common mistakes you’re probably making with your content marketing efforts.
Reasons content marketing isn’t working for you and how to fix it
1. You’re only focusing on one type of content marketing
Content marketing can take any of the following forms: blog posts, eBooks, case studies, templates, videos, whitepapers, infographics, podcasts, and social media, to name a few.
If you’re only focusing on one form, then you’ve already put yourself at a disadvantage.
Why? Because of the following reasons:
- Some of your audience might prefer other forms than the ones you’ve adopted
- You miss out on attracting the audiences of these other forms
What to do instead
Take a deep dive into audience analysis, and see what kinds of content your audiences like. Once you do, include them in your marketing plan.
There is no crime in having video content, blog posts, mind-blowing infographics, podcasts, and even screenshots of tweets in a blog post. As long as it appeals to your audience, then it’s worth it.
If you don’t know how to create any type of content, hire someone or find tools or online solutions. For example, you can learn all about how to make infographics online.
2. You don’t have a clear strategy
If you don’t have a clear content marketing strategy, it will be hard to realize anything meaningful with your campaigns.
By strategy, we mean what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it.
Many creators and brand owners who complain about not getting good results from content marketing are guilty of not having a definite strategy.
What to do instead
Answer the following questions:
- What do I want to achieve by deploying a content marketing campaign? Is it to gain more customers, increase my readership, get more subscribers, build a fan base, or sell just one product?
- What is my monthly or yearly target? 1000 customers/month, 5000 new monthly subscribers, or 10k Instagram followers?
- Which strategies are known to deliver these results? Buffer, for example, used guest posting to gain its first 100k followers. Yours may be social media content marketing, infographics marketing, podcast marketing, or eBook marketing.
3. You’re handling your content production alone
Source: Venngage
Nobody is an island, yet some creators still handle content creation, editing, designing, social media management, and video editing all by themselves.
It isn’t surprising that they don’t get good results.
What to do instead
You need to have a content production team, especially if you’re adopting content marketing on a large scale.
In your team, you may be responsible for textual content creation (blogs), while another team member handles the design of infographics and visuals. There may be other people responsible for audio content (podcasts), email newsletters, social media profile management, and so on.
Your team doesn’t have to be in-house; you can hire freelancers or outsource to agencies.
4. Your content isn’t unique
I’m sure you know you aren’t the first blog to talk about home garage door tips, credit score tips, weight loss guides, the latest iPhone 12 review, and so on.
Yet, you still create a blog in these niches and write about these topics.
Why?
If you’re still discussing what people have probably seen a billion times elsewhere, it will be hard to leave any impression on them.
You need to give your audience content that they won’t encounter on any other blog.
What to do instead
When you’re writing about a topic that’s already been covered, make sure you approach it from a new perspective. For example, instead of blogging about “How to develop an effective email marketing strategy,” you can go from the angle of “How we won our first 100k customers with email marketing.”
Brainstorm unique ideas so your content stands out in the crowd.
5. You’re not actively promoting your content
Content marketing is only as good as the number of eyes that see it. Even if you have an audience for your blog or social media pages, you still need to promote your content on other channels to get good results.
Most people publish blog posts on their blog and then sit back in the hopes that people will come and find them.
No, they won’t! You need to take your content to them.
What to do instead
- Join industry-related forums online: Promote your content in as many groups and forums as you’re present.
- Leverage social media and email marketing: Share your content across your social media channels, and any platform you’re in. When you’re through with that, send the content to all the contacts on your email lists.
- Advertise your content: If you have the ability to pay for ads, this is a great way to get your content noticed. You can run ads on Facebook, YouTube, Google, or Instagram.
Important note: When promoting your content on other platforms, it’s always best to have a landing page where incoming traffic can be diverted to. To get started with landing page creation, you can use these landing page makers.
6. You’re not creating content for your audience but search engines
With the growing focus around search engine optimization (SEO), people no longer focus on what matters to the audience.
Everybody’s interested in how to beat Google’s algorithms and rank #1.
While this is not a bad thing in itself, it can hurt your chances of getting good results from content marketing. You need to add emotion and realism to your content.
Search rankings are important but content should be aimed at solving human problems
What to do instead
Ensure the content you’re creating – whether blogs, images, videos, or audios – are all tailored to rank high on the SERPs and impress the target audience.
But if your content isn’t helpful to people, search engines won’t even rank you regardless of the work you put into SEO.
7. Your content isn’t search-friendly
As we mentioned, SEO is important for your content to be discovered on the internet.
If your content marketing efforts are struggling for results, it could be because of poor SEO.
Avoid using ineffective approaches like keyword stuffing, duplicating content, guest posting for links, paid links, links from bad websites, slow loading web pages, cloaking (invisible texts), etc.
What to do instead
You have to up your SEO game. Most people do their SEO themselves, but this doesn’t always guarantee good results.
You’re better off hiring an SEO expert who can help you with proper keyword analysis, competitor analysis, landing page optimization, off-page SEO, title tags, meta descriptions, mobile optimization, local SEO, voice search optimization, site speed, and diverse backlink portfolio.
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