Before your customers open their wallets…
They NEED information.
Initially this information should be about their problems, and how they can overcome them.
Then, once they admit they actually have a problem (and can’t solve it themselves) – they WANT information about how someone else can solve it for them.
This is what content marketing is trying to achieve for your business.
It’s making potential customers aware of their problem, and then giving them the information they need to trust you to solve it for them.
On the surface this sounds like a pretty simple concept.
Yet, way too many businesses are getting it all wrong and wasting a whole bunch of time and energy in the process.
We have a tendency of looking at the problems associated with poor content marketing and make broad assumptions about how to fix each of them in a vacuum.
In reality, there are exactly TWO things you need to do to make content marketing work for your business…
But before I reveal those, let’s have a quick look at the common mistakes for why content marketing fails.
Hint: One of them is about content marketing automation and lead generation.
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The mistakes…
1. It’s too much about you
“Look at me, I have a great product for you”
Some marketers are stuck in the “Mad Men” era of advertising, where a billboard would convince someone to make a purchase.
Billboards (or banner ads) are a great way to influence a purchase decision once someone already knows and trusts you. They are a reminder that you exist and that you are ready and willing to solve their problem.
But content marketing is a tool for building that initial trust and credibility – not to blast the world with self-absorbed marketing messages.
The harsh reality is your potential customers care about what you can do to help THEM.
After all, you’re just a stranger at this stage of the buying cycle.
You need to spend some time to get to know who they are and what they care about – then create helpful content to fulfill these desires.
Every time you write a piece of content, get into your customer’s shoes on and see life through their lens.
Ask yourself…
“If I was reading this, would I CARE?”
2. You’re fishing in the wrong place
(Image Source: Art in Mad Lines)
Where do your customers consume information?
That is a question that too many businesses skip, or completely misinterpret.
Finding out where your ideal customers are actively consuming content is a fundamental part of developing a successful content marketing strategy.
The default response to content marketing is to start a blog, and setup a few social media accounts.
Great.
But what if your customers aren’t looking to solve their problems by searching for written content?
If you were to choose just ONE form of content that would influence your customers and build credibility for your offering – what would it be?
The answer isn’t always a blog, it may be a YouTube channel, podcast or real-life event. (All of these are “content” driven marketing activities)
Find out where your customers are most frequently seeking information and carve a space for yourself there – don’t just create content because you’ve “heard” it is a good marketing strategy.
3. You focus on everything (and nothing)
Much like fishing in the wrong place, poor content marketing comes from spreading yourself too thin.
It’s easy to get lost in a sea of potential content forms and platforms to distribute that content – blogs, podcasts, videos on YouTube, Medium, Twitter, Facebook…
Unless you have a massive marketing team that can specialise in making the most of ALL of these platforms, you are better served focusing on your strengths.
Ask yourself first where your customers are most active. Then find out what resources you have available, and where your strengths are.
Once you are clear on these things, pick ONE content platform to start and work your way up.
You will experience a much better ROI if you concentrate on mastering one type of content or one social network, rather than trying to be everything to everyone.
If you try the latter, you won’t see any substantial results, you’ll lose motivation and before you know it giving up will feel like the best solution.
4. Your audience aren’t potential buyers
Perhaps you’re creating some great content, you’ve found a relevant platform and you are getting lots of traffic and shares for your effort.
But it’s not turning up in your back account.
No one is consuming your content, and then becoming a customer.
If this sounds like you, it may because you haven’t nailed your ideal buyer persona.
You need to go beyond demographics, and understand what makes your ideal customer tick.
This is a common challenge with content marketing, because we chase the vanity metrics.
We create content that will get attention and create buzz for our brand, but forget about what the REAL goal is.
To grow your business by solving the problems your customers face.
Let me illustrate how this can go wrong with a story.
Groove HQ are an online helpdesk software – similar to Zen desk, but aimed at small online businesses. There founder Alex Turnbull is well known for the content strategy he implemented to grow their monthly revenue from 0 to over 500 thousand dollars. It’s an amazing journey, and he shares every step of the way on their blog.
However, what he found after blogging for a while is that there traffic and email list were growing dramatically, but their audience base was on a bit of a plateau.
On reflection, what he discovered and kindly shared with the world, was that he had been creating content for the wrong audience. He was writing about blogging and online marketing instead of the pains his true audience felt.
As soon as they shifted their content strategy to talk more about the core problems their business solves, as they relate to customer service, all of a sudden their audience growth boomed and their revenue followed.
That is why great content marketing starts with your customers.
Your content needs to solve a problem that people are searching for, and it needs to be a problem that inevitably your product or service will help relieve in the future. Otherwise you are taking a “hit and hope” approach.
5. You’re not growing an email list
Of the people that seek information online, 85% of them use email as a way to communicate. On the other hand, all social media networks combined only reach 62% of internet users.
What this tells us is, that even if it’s not the sexiest or newest channel to reach your audience, email is still the most effective way to grow your business online. (It gives you access to more people)
This means if you are producing content for your website and attracting people to that content, you need to capture their email address.
The act of giving up an email address accrues a base level of trust, and empowers you with the ability to talk to that person beyond their visit to your website.
If you choose not to build an email list, you are leaving a whole bunch of value on the table. Because in reality, once someone leaves your site they have no reason to return (unless you give them one).
Once someone is on your list, then you can build trust with marketing automation and email drip campaigns. This will lead to sales and business growth.
6. Your lead magnets are generic and un-compelling
Ok cool, so you’re growing an email list.
But are you doing this in the most effective way possible?
Most business will create one or two lead magnets for their site, and throw them on the end of every blog post. (Usually a generic eBook or something)
The better way is to create something SUPER specific for every problem you solve with your content.
This concept is often referred to as a “content upgrade” and is typically a downloadable resource that complements your content. It is specific to the problem your content solves, and builds on what you have available for free.
You are literally “upgrading” the free content, and giving away something even more valuable in exchange for an email address.
This style of lead magnet is far more compelling for a prospect than something generic, hence increasing your conversion rate and growing your email list.
You will see a bunch of different lead magnets embedded in our blog posts here at Marketing Results, like this;
7. You’ve got no buy-in
Perhaps you’ve got a boss that doesn’t see the value in content marketing?
Or on the flip side, you can’t inspire your staff to contribute?
This is a common challenge marketers face. The punch line is, people want a direct line of sight to results and outcomes… Content marketing often doesn’t provide that.
Getting buy-in from people is essential if you want to be successful with content marketing, because you need the whole team going in one direction. The more buy-in you have, the less pressure you will feel and the better results you will get.
Here are some quick fire tactics for getting buy-in from your team;
Get them involved in the planning phase (that way they own it)
Ask them if they would like to grow their personal brand (Hint: content marketing is perfect for this)
Align their benefits and perks around contribution to the content strategy
Become obsessive about measuring success – get extremely clear on what “success” would look, feel and smell like, and then establish achievable goals to track progress
8. You’re not coming up with enough ideas
It’s easy to start spinning your wheels if you don’t have lots of content ideas stocked and ready to go.
What happens, is every time you are due to create something, you have to come up with a new idea. It’s tiresome, riddled with anxiety and unsustainable.
Instead, use a quarterly planning phase to map out a long list of topics you want to cover. (Preferably things your customers care about)
Here is how you can come up with more content ideas;
Revisit the core problems you solve as a business
Conduct keyword research
Copy your competitors (but do it better)
Do some social media research (to see what people are talking about)
Crawl blog comments (to see what questions are being asked)
Repurpose your best content (an example would be turning a blog post into a video)
Capture client case studies
Answer questions from Quora
9. Your content is inconsistent (or not evergreen)
Does your website traffic look a bit like this?
Often content marketing (and more specifically blogging) has this effect on website traffic.
When you publish something, your traffic spikes, but then what? There’s a great big hole in between blog posts, and after a while you feel like a mouse on a wheel trying to keep traffic consistent.
So there are two ways you can approach this…
You can produce content more regularly, and mitigate the ebs and flows of traffic
This is my least favourite option, because as soon as you stop producing the traffic stops.
Alternatively, you can create EPIC pieces of content… The type of content that is evergreen (valuable today, tomorrow and in 12 months time), definitive and mind-blowingly helpful.
If you take the second option, you can focus more time on promoting your content and building a list of prospects.
Over time (if you do it well) these resourceful pieces of content will deliver you sustainable search engine traffic and the spikes and troughs will level out.
10. Promoting your content isn’t a priority
Effective content marketing can grow your business, but it won’t just miraculously work itself out.
The best content marketers are hustlers. They work harder on finding the people they need to see their content, than they do on creating it.
Too many marketers assume that creating content is all that it takes. But in reality, promoting your content is where the game is won.
Every time you release a piece of content to the world you should spend just as much, if not more, time promoting it.
It doesn’t matter how good your content is, without effective promotion no one will see it. And even worse, no one will CARE.
The best way to promote your content is to have a strict, step-by-step process, you use every time you launch a piece of content.
Because the content itself doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to promote it.
Does that mean you just throw out a few Tweets and see what happens?
No. This generally doesn’t work unless you have an enormous amount of followers.
Here are 5 other things you could be doing to promote your content;
Find people who have shared similar content in the past on BuzzSumo and directly ask them to share your content
Collaborate with influencers to amplify the reach of your content
Schedule recurring social media snippets using Meet Edgar
Send a broadcast email to your subscriber list and then add your content into an autoresponder series
Submit your content to online communities in your niche (Examples include Scoop.it, Google + Communities and Inbound.org)
So what can you do differently?
These are the things that you THINK (on the surface) are the problems you need to solve for.
But trying to solve them in isolation is ineffective, and can be further damaging to your content marketing efforts.
Sure they all contribute to a bad content marketing strategy, but that’s not a solution.
Instead, here’s what you should do…
Do this 1st: Find a purpose
Create a guiding light that directs all your efforts. A purpose to pursue.
This is a simple sentence or two about WHY you are using content marketing to grow your business.
If you are clear about WHY, all of a sudden the rest of this stuff falls into place.
Are you building your personal brand?
Are you nurturing your current clients with helpful information?
Are you trying to generate leads?
Are you purely building thought leadership?
What EXACTLY are you trying to do?
Have a think about it. Write it down. Pin it on your corkboard.
Do something so you don’t forget WHY… It will help you with all of these other challenges I’ve discussed.
Do this 2nd: Create a content machine
Once you have a purpose, then you need to think of everything holistically…
How does every cog in your content marketing machine aggressively and sequentially pursue this purpose?
This is the money-making part of your content marketing strategy. You are thinking of your entire funnel from top to bottom.
Who are your customers?
What type of content do they like to consume?
Who within our team can create that content?
How can we get this content in front of them?
Once they see the content, how can we entice them to subscribe to our email list?
What’s the typical buyer’s journey our autoresponder sequence needs to guide new subscribers on?
What additional content do we need to support this sequence?
Get clear on these things and then you can focus on automating and optimising as much of the process as possible.
If you’ve got your purpose up on your corkboard and you can clearly answer all of these questions – content marketing WILL help you grow your business.
If you don’t, it’s going to take up too much of your time with no ROI.
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"The Sales Lead Machine Blueprint"
Specifically for marketers of complex services and major products
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The post Why Most Content Marketing Fails (And What To Do About It) appeared first on Marketing Results.