Content marketing is an essential component of most brands’ marketing strategies. It has the potential to generate remarkable results that can impact every aspect of your business and online presence. However, success only comes if you do it correctly. While many brands worldwide are reaping the benefits of their content marketing efforts, just as many are left puzzled as to why it is not working for them. If you are among those not achieving the desired results, there are six common reasons why your content marketing is not working. Let’s explore each cause and its solutions.
1. No Goal in Your Content Marketing Strategy
Many brands adopt content marketing without setting specific goals for their strategy. They produce blog posts without a clear purpose, hoping for the best. This lack of specific goals is ultimately why their content marketing fails. To avoid this, you must determine what you want to accomplish with your blog posts. Do you want to increase sales, get more leads, showcase industry expertise, or boost SEO rankings? You need to optimize each post for the specific goal you want to achieve and not hope for the best. Doing thorough keyword research, using alt tags in images, and specifying meta descriptions can help increase the chances of your content being indexed. Placing clickable CTAs throughout your site to learn more about a product or sign up for your newsletter can drive sales and leads. Providing consistent, high-quality content educating your readers can build your credibility.
2. Stagnant Content
It is easy to stick to what works once in your content marketing strategy. However, while this might work for a while, users will get bored if they don’t feel like each post offers them something fresh and new. You might lose viewers in favor of competitors that are more diverse. To prevent stagnation, you can feature high-quality guest posts from other industry experts, add infographics or videos, place interactive features (like polls or quizzes) in your content, share a mix of case studies, how-to information, and breaking industry news. Check what’s trending now, and keep an eye on what’s working for you, and check your analytics frequently.
3. Not Tracking Results
Some businesses run entire content marketing strategies without thoroughly tracking any of their results. Monitoring analytics of your content can tell you what’s working and what isn’t, and it can often give you insight into how to produce better content over time. Some important metrics to track include conversion rates, including leads or sales, bounce rate, engagement rates, and page views. Tracking the activity on your website is important, but it’s also essential to see how your content marketing is affecting your social media and email marketing campaigns. They’re all interconnected, so looking at the big picture is essential. Google Analytics is a great go-to tool for all businesses, and other tools let you create dashboards that pull analytic information from multiple sources.
4. The Same Content as Everyone Else
With a million posts about the same topic, how is yours going to be different? Ultimately, you need to decide how you’re going to be different and what you can uniquely offer readers that no one else can. Even if it’s just your writing style and your voice that’s unique, something has to be special. To write unique posts and lead magnets, you can comb the internet and message boards for unanswered questions. There’s an audience and a demand for content that addresses questions that keep getting asked over and over again. Another great method of creating new posts is to take a broader idea and focus on one niche idea that fits within it. Sometimes, creating content that’s different from everything else will rely on a combination of research and understanding your specific niche.
5. Not Actionable
Many content pieces are so heavily theoretical, or there’s so much information overload that users walk away thinking, “well, I still don’t know how to do any of that.” Your content should offer specific actionable content that users can make use of. Actionable content is valuable content, and that’s what will drive results.
6. Reads like a Sales Pitch
While you can feature your products and place information to drive conversions, your content should not read like one long sales pitch. It doesn’t feel genuine, and readers are less likely to trust it. If you’re going to promote a product or place affiliate links, it should almost never be the center of a blog post or lead magnet. Instead, subtle mentions of a product and a link and/or CTA to learn more are all that’s needed. You can also place a call to action at the end of the post, encouraging users to contact you to learn how you can help them more.
Final Thoughts
Content marketing can work, and if you’re putting regular, consistent effort into it, it should be working. However, it requires a specific strategy, goals, tracking, unique content, actionable content, and avoiding sales pitch-like content. By following these tips, you can optimize your content marketing strategy and achieve the desired results.
