You’ve been sold on the grand strategy that is content marketing. You’ve taken the time to produce a novel’s worth of content, distributed it to your channels, and have sat waiting for what you hoped would be a surge in traffic. On opening up your Google Webmaster Tools, however, you have found your traffic is still flat. No new conversions, your phone still rarely rings, and you question why you invested all that time and money into something that doesn’t work.
The thing to remember is that content marketing DOES work, if it does not seem to be you are probably doing it wrong. Sounds harsh, but content marketing is a fine art, and just like with any art it takes time and effort to do it right. While I cannot promise that all of these problems apply to you, they are common enough failings that they deserve mention, and rectifying that problem may help your content marketing strategy succeed in the future.
You Don’t Have a Content Marketing Strategy
This is probably the most common problem with most content marketing strategies: they do not exist. If it does not exist, that is almost certainly the primary problem with anything. In fact, according to a study by the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, nearly half of all content marketers in B2B fields do not have a documented strategy. While most companies do have a dedicated content strategist, the lack of a documented content marketing strategy means you depend entirely on the memory of one person. While that one person might be intelligent and have a very good memory, the lack of documentation means something could easily slip, and your organization’s content marketi
ng strategy is limited to how long that one employee can stick around.
Coming up with a content marketing strategy is not easy, you often have to start from where you want the customer to end up (a contact form or a sales page), and then work backwards from there. Furthermore, you have to carry this out while keeping the goals of your ideal customer in mind, and molding your strategy to accommodate these goals. This is not something that you can just store in your memory; this is something you have to write down just as a General has to write down his battle plans before going to war.
Not Investing Enough
There is a reason nobody calls content marketing “the poor man’s marketing strategy.” Content marketing is expensive, requiring a significant investment of time, money, and raw resources in order to pull off successfully. Documents, articles, and blog posts all have to be written. Videos have to be produced and edited. Photographs have to be taken and touched up to make them presentable. Each of these requires time and money to be invested. You cannot just use one or two tactics and expect success either.
Remember that time is money, and a professional’s time tends to be worth much money. This becomes even truer if you are demanding that your content be produced by a certain date (and you should be, more on that later). For any serious content marketing campaign, I would not budget less than $10,000. This might seem like a lot for a smaller business, but between the volume of content you’ll be producing and the quality you will demand, that budget will be eaten up quickly. However, the return on a content marketing investment is more than worth the price tag.
Lousy Content
As I said a few lines up, you need quality content. If your content sucks, and in many cases it does, then it is not going to produce the results you want. The content you deliver is awash in a sea that had more information added to it in the past 15 years than in the entire 20th century combined. Humanity is producing information and content at an exponential rate, and there is no room for lousy content. If you are not delivering quality to your audience, it will be quickly forgotten and pushed aside with all of the other chaff.
Now, what does ‘quality content’ actually mean? You’ve probably heard that expression a lot, but have no idea how quality is defined. In the case of written content, you want it to be grammatically immaculate, be enjoyable for the reader, and be long enough to convey the information promised in the header. There is quite much debate about long-form content in written materials, and I take on the belief that the right content will be read through entirely, even if it is a 2000-word article. You just have to make sure you are providing information that your reader wants. The information that they want is in the title of your article.
Take this article for example: the promise is to tell you why your content marketing strategy is not working. As such, to count as a quality piece of content, you should come away from this with a few ideas that you did not have before.
Poor Targeting
Another common reason for the failure of a content marketing campaign is poor targeting. As part of your content marketing strategy, you should be developing buyer personas and have a clear idea of who your consumer is. Even more important, you have to have a clear idea of how they get from the problem your product solves, to buying your product. Unless you have the advantage of being a very well recognized brand name, nobody is going to start thinking that they need to buy your product. In fact, depending on the service you offer, the person might not even realize your kind of product or service even exists.
As such, each piece of content you create has to be created for your ideal customer, to get them from somewhere along that funnel into the next part. Create content to help your ideal customer know what to search for. Don’t dig into your product or service yet, or the customer will doubt the sincerity of your words. Once you help them articulate the problem, move them down to figuring out what to look for, and then at the end, who to buy it from.
If your content does not target the right person, however, then it is not going to move them along that funnel. At best, it will simply be uninteresting to them, and at worst they might find your content annoying. This is why it is important to understand who your customer is. There is nothing wrong with directly asking people what they want and what they are interested in. This will allow you to tailor your approach to your customer, and provide them what they are after. Note that content comes in many forms: it could be a blog post, a video, an interactive infographic, a slideshow, with the only limit being your imagination.
Time
One of the biggest reasons why your content marketing strategy might appear to be failing is because you have not given it enough time to have an effect. Content marketing is not something that delivers rapid results, and anybody who claims that it can deliver rapid results does not know what they are talking about. At a minimum, you are looking at a six to twelve month timeframe to see your content marketing efforts move in the right direction.
This is perhaps the primary aspect of content marketing that many marketers forget: is the timeframe they are looking at. In a world of instant results, it can be difficult to wait patiently for results for weeks, let alone months. However, it takes time to build up awareness, and growth will be slow at first. You will have to accept that for the first few months, the most you’ll be able to accomplish is help people realize that a problem even exists.
However, you should not despair. Remember that content marketing is a long-term investment, and it takes time to pay off. Once you’ve managed to grow awareness of your brand, you’ll start to see payoffs in the form of new, better quality leads. Once again, the important thing to remember is time. If you are responsible for pitching a content marketing strategy to superiors, then that is the primary principle to keep in mind.
Conclusion
Without looking at your individual content marketing strategy, it is hard to say exactly what is wrong with it. However, the above points are the most common reasons content tactics fail to yield the desired results. If after checking all of the above, you still find that your content marketing strategy is failing you and you cannot determine why, feel free to get in touch with us and we can go over your options.
