February 16, 2017 //// Case Studies
I daily come across many people who have absolutely no idea why their content marketing strategies are failing or not as effective as they think.
Did you know that nearly 55% of surveyed B2B marketers said that they have no clue how an effective content marketing strategy looks like? Or 48% of B2B marketers have a content strategy but it is not documented? In most of the cases, the content strategies seem to be an abject failure but why? What is causing them this obscene failure?
Source: contentmarketinginstitute.com
If indeed content marketing strategy is a tried-and-tested method and is being used by most of the companies, then why aren’t businesses getting their ROI in content marketing? Well. The answer to this is because of some common mistakes in content marketing can go horribly wrong and it just becomes a useless or ineffective strategy.
I know you have a great website, exceptional social media presence, (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) or weekly informative articles, but all this goes waste unless you have a content strategy to make it more searchable. You might be thinking publishing articles or posts on LinkedIn or Facebook is what content strategy is and that will get you all you want. But sorry to say this, you are wrong guys. There are already tons and tons of articles on the internet about almost everything. So before approaching your target audience, you will have to be unique and different about your strategy from start to end.
Even though your content strategy is nothing but perfect, there might be still some reasons why your strategy is failing. These 4 are the most common mistakes I mostly find.
Reason 1. You Aren’t Solving Anything
It’s a good thing to make an article or a post informative but it isn’t enough. You need to make it persuasive too. Why would anyone search for blog or posts? Because they are finding some answers or solutions. What is the use when you receive a plethora of posts that are just filled with lists? If the content is just about the things that your readers are already familiar with then certainly it makes no sense.
Pro tip:
Make every little piece of content both informative and persuasive so that your readers can find it useful in some or the other way. Questions like “How to make a video from images?” or “How to make HTML page responsive?” get you more traction because the content strategy is more about identifying problems and less about executing solutions. Problem-solving content is more beneficial for a business because, for people who love to build themselves as knowledgeable, your content should assist them.
Reason 2. You’re doing a “So Am I” Content Strategy
This one is extremely common amongst marketers. Of course, you are providing great content that is useful to your readers but how much useful? You can write impressive long-form articles and videos about your business that can get you a lot of customer attention but what are you doing instead?
Whatever your competitors are publishing you are just following the same.
The problem starts when you are replicating the same topics and delivering the same value or even no value content to your target audience. It is of no use even though your post is 1000-word and still gives the same tips and tricks that your readers are already familiar with time and again.
Pro tip:
Make sure you are creating content that is 10 times better than what your audience is already reading and 10 times better than anything that your peers are publishing.
Before creating the content, you need to know and understand for whom you are writing:
Who are my customers?
Who are my potential customers?
Who would find my content helpful?
To understand this, usually, you should create buyer personas so that you can figure out what your customers want based on types of customers.
Reason 3. You’re Not Using Pictures or Images
A report says that Buzzfeed is in the list of top Facebook publishers. What do you think makes them the king in the content strategy? It is because of their perfection in communicating through images. Did you observe some of their posts barely contain any content but still they do it very well?
Source: Adweek.com
Pro tip:
Now the point here is that readers love images especially the ones that can help move the content along. Equip your post with images that have good resolution and make use of proper Open Graph tags. Your content marketing strategy needs relevant images that either tell a story or solve a problem.
Reason 4. You aren’t Promoting the Content
Having no content and doing nothing after you create content are both the same things. Fine, let me explain. Many of us think that content marketing is all about creating content but that’s not the end of the story. How do you think readers are going to find your post? Though organic traffic and people will read it and hence convert into customers?
You are wrong!
Pro tip:
Creating content is just one part of the content marketing strategy. You are only considering the first part of the term “Content Marketing.” The other half is how you promote it. Well there are truly endless ways to promote a single post or article:
Newsletter
Facebook Posting
LinkedIn Posting
Pitch influencers who can share your post
Pitch bloggers and ask them to share your post
There are million other reasons why content marketing might be not working effectively or at all for you. Other reasons such as an ineffective SEO, content not mapped out properly, or a horrible content distribution strategy could be why your content strategy is failing. There isn’t any ballpark of reasons for this but when you can implement content marketing strategy then I’m sure you can figure it out too why it isn’t working effectively.
Albeit the growth of content marketing is touching the sky, we are still in the inception stage of understanding it. However, if you replace the vague idea of “Strategy” with some idealistic goals, you can see a growth in your content strategy.
Did you experience a slump in your content marketing strategy too? Let us know what helped you come out of it by commenting in the section below. We would love to know.
Author Bio:
Shahid Mansuri co-founded Peerbits, one of the leading mobile app development companies, in 2011. His visionary leadership and flamboyant management style have yield fruitful results for the company. He believes in sharing his strong knowledge base with leaned concentration on entrepreneurship and business. Being an avid nature lover, he likes to flaunt his pajamas on beach during the vacations.
