The beauty of content marketing is that it gives brands from all industries and sizes a chance to make a profound impact. Even more, it doesn’t take a huge budget to produce and distribute awesome material. According to DemandMetric, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional strategies and can generate roughly three times as many leads.
However, it is not as easy as it sounds. With any business, there are a good deal of red flags that indicate that your content approach is falling flat. There is no set formula or law put in place to guarantee victory. The process will more than likely be filled with instances of trial and error. Something that worked great one day might be obsolete the next.
On the other hand, there are a number of common threads as to why campaigns fail. Let’s discuss some reasons you might not be seeing the results you dreamt of.
Not choosing topics wisely
Let’s say you run a blog on your website and promote it through social media. You can produce whatever material you want, right? Wrong.
If your goal is to spread awareness, bring more visitors to your website, and convert them, you will need to plan topics strategically. A well-received piece of content is one that sparks interest at the most optimal time and place.
Even though you might find a topic interesting, the masses might think otherwise. With each piece you create, always have a clear idea as to what problems it solves for the viewer.
Start by researching pieces of previously published content from competitors and how they are performing. Once you’ve pinpointed the prevalent topics within your industry, you need to find ways to improve it. This is where you get to let your creative side shine through and produce compelling material.
Another good strategy is to listen to what users are saying on social media with tools like Mention.
This will help reveal trending issues and concerns within your industry and yield inspiration for topics.
Improper planning and poor coordination
Content marketing requires a lot of work. Managing every aspect of the project from the planning stage all the way to evaluation can pose as a huge challenge for even the most adept companies. Even more so if your efforts require multiple departments.
According to research, only 40% of projects succeed in meeting budget, schedule, and quality goals.
High-caliber results start from the inside. Content marketing is an entity where if anything slips through the cracks, there can be big consequences. Look into collaboration tools like WorkZone to improve communication between the creative, sales and support departments, and optimize teamwork in content creation with group calendars. You can also see individual workload reports and manage campaign assets with real-time document sharing.
Regardless of how big or small your operation is; your marketing will never succeed unless you prevent lapses in communication. You can have the most genius content plan the internet has ever seen, but if it is not properly executed from A to Z, it can turn into a lot of wasted time and money.
Disregarding SEO
One of the biggest mistakes you can make in content marketing is failing to optimize your content for the search engines. SEO and content go hand-in-hand. Omitting relevant keywords and phrases can cause you to miss out on a big chunk of success.
Luckily, merging these two techniques is relatively simple. All it takes a bit of fresh keyword research. Ranking for the right terms is one of the most crucial factors in the digital marketing world. You will need to do some brainstorming by putting yourself in the mindset of your ideal customer.
If you were searching for your product or service, what would you type into the search bar? Let’s take the example of property search and records provider Arivify – their blog puts out educational content for property buyers:
But how does such a site know what their customers are searching for? Once you have a starting set of terms nailed down, check with a tool like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer to find the most optimal words and phrases to target:
This platform provides insights on how certain keywords are performing as well as historical statistics to see how they might perform in the future. Setting up a comprehensive list of terms and phrases lays the groundwork for your entire campaign. From there, you will need to include the proper titles, headings, meta descriptions, and anchor text in your content for the best results.
Great content by itself can only take you so far. Failure to add the SEO components can be detrimental to click-rates.
Not measuring results
In the current era of digital marketing, analytics are an essential piece of the puzzle in every content strategy. Failure to measure results is one of the biggest sins you can commit. Without tracking your content to see what works and what doesn’t, how do you know where to improve?
Your entire strategy should be constantly improving as you learn from both victories and failures. There a lot of free tools to find out how well your pieces are resonating with the masses.
Picking up on information like how frequently a certain headline gets clicked on or where your traffic is coming from is critical in shaping (and reshaping) your approach.
Wrapping up
Running a strong content strategy from is difficult. There will undoubtedly be a number of speedbumps along the way. Luckily, these factors that might contribute to a failing campaign are avoidable. Most problems in the realm of content marketing can be traced back to: research on the target audience, creativity, and evaluation. The most important thing you can do is maintain a solid effort. Long-term benefits come from consistent hard work.