They say Content is king and you believed it.
You created an awesome content marketing strategy for your business and did all that the gurus taught you.
They said long form content is what attracts the most shares and you did it.
They taught you to use keywords when writing your contents, you did it.
They said you should create content that resonates with your audience, you did it.
But, it’s just not working.
You are not seeing a good ROI on your efforts.
The truth is:
You are doing the right thing and I quite understand.
What can be wrong with the right content for your audience?
The reasons you are not succeeding with content marketing is because you are doing a lot of things wrong.
Actually, it is not your fault, it is just that no one is telling you how to do it right.
It will amaze you to discover that 88% of businesses are into content marketing. Out of that huge percentage, 30% of them said they are effective in content marketing. That means a total percentage of 53% businesses that use content marketing are not finding it effective.
Is it that content marketing does not work?
No, it works!
So what is the problem?
Below are the reasons why your content marketing strategy is not working.
1. Wrong content marketing strategy
The first reason why your content marketing strategy goes wrong is because you did not document your strategy. The b2b report on content marketing reported that 32% b2b marketers have a documented strategy. 48% have a strategy, but it is not documented and 4% are not even sure.
The truth is: anything that is not documented is difficult to measure. How would you know whether you are succeeding with content marketing or not without it being documented?.
Even with the documentation of the content marketing strategy, some are still doing it the wrong way. Most documented content marketing strategies lack:
a. A Call to action
Many content marketing strategies overlook a call to action lead form. This means that even though content marketers focus on producing helpful and valuable content for their audiences, they aren’t actively growing their audiences from that content. If you don’t use your content to attract engaged audiences, content marketing will turn into a cost instead of a benefit for your business.
Buffer app is a great example of a business that built its audience with content. The formula they use is:
The company used this method to double their email list within 30 days.
They created awesome contents and ask the reader for emails in several ways. They use slide ups and popups to get the best responses.
Find a sample below:
You could ask your audience to subscribe to your newsletters, blog, video series, digital magazines, print magazines, podcasts etc.
Implementing this strategy will help you to convert readers into leads.
b. Consistency
B2b business marketers from companies of all sizes are creating more content.
In addition to that, 42% b2b marketers publish content daily and multiple times per week.
Publishing content in a consistent manner contributes immensely to the success of your content marketing strategy.
This has to align with your goals in the first place. If you need to double your traffic, check the number of views you get per each post and double up. For instance, if a post gets 100 views, you can double up by creating two posts to get 200 views. Neil Patel did this for his blog. He wanted to increase his traffic to 100,000 visitors and so, he doubled his post creation and got much more than that (123,867) within a year. He was posting once a week, initially but he increase it to twice and the traffic also increased.
Creating consistent content will make it easy for readers to find you and positions you as an expert in your field.
2. You are not doing SEO
Secondly, your content marketing strategy goes wrong because you have no plans for SEO. Both content marketing and SEO work together. If you only focus on content marketing without SEO, you might as well forget about creating content because nobody will find it. However, you need to be careful to write for people first before thinking of optimizing it for search engines. All you need to do is to write compelling content about topics your audience will like to read.
Content marketing enables you to learn about your target audience, discover their pain points and create content to solve their problems. You use SEO to do keyword research looking for relevant keywords with high volumes.
Both SEO and content marketing are great ways to drive traffic to your websites.
3. You are not promoting your content
Content creation is only half of the job. It requires extensive promotion to make it work. Some business owners think content marketing is all about producing content, and visitors will find the content by proxy. They will read and engage with it.
That used to work a long time ago, but not anymore.
The second half of the content marketing is content promotion.
Are you only creating content without promoting it? That is a sure way to fail.
You can promote your content through your email newsletter, twitter, Facebook page, Linkedin, contacting influencers in your niche to help share your content etc.
Therefore, if you have not been promoting your content consistently, now is the time to start.
4. Creating low quality content
Churning out low quality content is another good reason why your content marketing strategy goes wrong. Although content marketing means creating contents, the quality of those contents also matters. You can’t just create content for the sake of it and expect to get good results. It will not happen.
Many business owner creates low quality content because they hire inexpensive writers. It is very common to see business owners hiring writers who will create an article at $10. They give them lists of topics to write and when they are done, post the content on their website. This is content marketing right? No. This is very wrong. The worst thing about this method is that the writers produce very low quality content that will bring you little to no results.
This is the reason why you need to hire quality writers that will help you create quality content that can bring you great results.
You don’t need lots of content, all you need are quality content that will rank high in search engine. The only way you can produce it is by hiring good content writers.
5. You have lots of competitors
A good reason why your content marketing strategy goes wrong is because you have huge competitors. It is normal to have competing businesses around you. It is difficult to face big companies that produce good amounts of quality content. It is hard, but not impossible.
If you are faced with such a difficult situation, what you do is to keep producing high quality content. Don’t be discouraged or stop creating content. Keep up the momentum. Make sure you get a group of loyal fans who will be committed to you. You can also analyze your competitor to see what content is working for them and what their content is missing and then create a better one to outrank them.
Conclusion
The reasons why your content marketing strategy goes wrong and you are not getting any tangible result, is obviously because you have wrong content marketing strategy, not adding SEO to your content marketing, not promoting your content, creating low quality content and huge competitors. Not to worry, follow the steps above and you will overcome all these issues and start seeing great ROI on your investments.