Content Strategy Not Working? Here are the 6 Reasons Why
Content Strategy Not Working? Here are the 6 Reasons Why
Click on any blog related to content marketing and you will read “Content is the king” somewhere mentioned there. Content with the right content strategy helps you build your brand, make it visible to your audiences, boost customer trust, increase conversion rate, and even close sales. But does this ‘king’ bring everyone the same profits? Here is your content strategy not working? Here are six reasons why.
Today, we see every one creating content, and over 70% of the marketers are even actively investing to scale content marketing. But the sad truth is — not all of these marketers are happy with the results they see.
In the majority of the cases, it is not the content that is to be blamed. It is rather the content strategy.
Despite putting in all the efforts to make the content work, many still see their content lost somewhere in the deep dark digital abyss.
With minimal views, zero interaction, no engagement, and certainly no conversion, the dream of dominating the world with your content could instantly turn into a nightmare. But there is a ray of hope that will pull you out from failing at your content strategy.
Here is a blog that will tell you the main reasons why your content strategy is failing and how you can fix the strategy to succeed.
Because You Are Writing for the Bots and Not Humans
One of the biggest mistakes that most of the companies make when following a content strategy is that they focus too much on making their content rank than making it interesting. Google bots have become super smart and would automatically rank your content if it is loved by the people.
If your target audiences are not able to connect with what you write — it will be of no value to your company.
You will never be serving your target audience if you stuff your content with keywords, key phrases, and links.
Check for your content strategy.
Is it totally backed by keyword analysis and nothing else? Are you just churning out new content every other day to make sure your keywords rank?
If that’s the case, your content strategy is never going to work. Here are some mistakes in your content strategy that are taking you down.
- Writing just enough (300 words) to fulfill Google guidelines without covering the complete topic.
- Unnecessary stuffing the content with long and short tail keywords that make no sense to the reader.
- Hyperlinking the content with just the service or product rather than linking it to informative pieces.
Quick Fixing Tip:
While writing content, you need to ensure that it is written with humans in mind and only optimized for search engines.
- Create content that is catering to the needs of your readers and is still optimized for search engines.
- Make sure it has at least 1,890 words. This way, it covers the complete topic and also makes Google web crawlers happy.
- Keywords are important. Place them strategically. Primary keyword once in the first paragraph, title, and URL.
- To avoid keyword stuffing yet ranking for the same, use LSI keywords to make your content look more natural.
- Link your content but make sure it is linking to both internal and external pages that provide value to your readers.
- Images are important to keep your reader entertained. You can use these images to gain ranking as well by adding Alt Tags and ensuring it ranks on Google images. When creating top-performing content on Google, you also need to add images with Alt Tags in it.
Because You are Scared of Experimenting with Content Forms
In an age when you are surrounded by content in all forms, limiting your content strategy to just blogs and articles is a sin. You might have a full-blown content strategy in place with a content calendar that ensures your writers churn out content pieces and post them on your website or external platforms. However, it is 2020 and your target audiences have gone far beyond consuming content through just one means.
Each business starts its content strategy from ‘having a blog page.’ And it is great as over 60% of the businesses that acquired more customers had a blogging channel in place. But thinking that that’s enough is where you start failing.
You need to study your buyer persona and the stage they are in the buyer journey to offer them the required kind of content for a successful inbound marketing initiative as well.
For example, a buyer in the awareness stage would like to have blogs and ebooks or guides around the topic. Those in the consideration stage might look for whitepapers, blogs on ‘tips’ or ‘best ways’, etc. And those in the decision stage of their journey would rather look for case studies, videos, industry reports in the niche.
The mistake you are doing is that you are offering all types of buyers in all stages of their buyer journey with the same content. Neither are you looking at the buyer demographics nor on the stage of their journey to create customized content.
If your content strategy is failing even in the times when content is the king, know that it is the time to diversify.
Quick Fixing Tip:
- The best way to diversify your content strategy is by repurposing your content. This way, you don’t have to increase your team size to create all types of content. You simply need to repurpose the content that’s already available with you. In fact, 60% of marketers use their one piece of content in two to five ways.
- Turn your content into different forms like videos, podcasts, ebooks, pdfs, infographics, etc., to ensure it reaches audiences in the way they consume their content.
- Look for content that is already working with the audiences and update in to make it brand new. Add new pointers, create images, and make it eye-catchy, provide new examples, improve the layout, and much more to ensure it keeps the visitors engaged.
- Create videos from your engaging blogs
- Make social media graphics to build your community of readers there
- Offer downloadable content in the form of pdfs, guides, whitepapers, etc.
- Transform your long-form content into ebooks and send them across to your clients
- Create a buzz among your audience by creating a post that talks about the best round-up posts.
- If you have some really good information-rich content, create webinars from them to build your authority in the niche
Because Your Competitors Already Dominate the Niche
Your content is good, you are producing all types of content, and even promoting it right. Yet, you are not able to succeed with your content marketing. Why?
Maybe because your competitors are way too strong.
Yes, one of the main reasons why a majority of the businesses see their content strategy failing is because they are up against industry giants. Many times, businesses are doing nothing wrong, it’s just that they are in an industry or market that is already dominated by big names. In such situations, it is only human to feel that it is not much you can do. But giving up should never be the case.
Think you cannot fight the saturated or dominated market? You can.
Quick Fixing Tip:
If you are also in an industry where your competitors have left no scope for you and no matter what you do, your content is still not working, here is what you can do.
- Offer problem-solving content to ensure that your target audience can rely on you for solutions
- Be consistent with your content delivery and never back down. Slowly and steadily, you will reach the top.
- Start with building a small niche group of followers with your content and start expanding it.
- Try the skyscraper method of creating content where you find the best piece of your competitor’s content and generate something even better.
- Look where they are lacking through a thorough competitor analysis. There must be something they are missing out on and that’s where you need to hit with your content strategy.
Because You Are Not Creating Valuable Content
Producing content for content’s sake is not going to take you far. It should always provide some value to your audience. A very prominent reason why the majority of the companies do not succeed with their content is that they get too busy simply churning out content pieces one after the other without considering if it is working for their audiences or not.
You are not thinking about your audience while creating content. It is only the numbers you are worried about. And the same thing has passed on to your writers as well. They aren’t worried about content quality or the value it would create with the readers, they are simply meeting the deadlines and targets of writing x number of words each day.
Quick Fixing Tip:
When it comes to writing valuable content for the audiences, there are many things you can do. Here are some of them:
- Have a buyer persona and analyze the characteristic of the audience to know what kind of content they like. You need to find what clicks your audience and create content that engages them.
- Your content team should be experienced and know how to create high-quality content. You cannot expect them to create great content if you haven’t familiarized them with your target buyer personas. Make sure they have complete information about your company’s offering, working process, and the target audience so that they can create valuable content.
- Make your content stand out by adding some unique qualities to them and offer value in one way or the other.
- Give a different angle or perspective to your content to ensure that it is creating more value for your audiences
- Talk to your sales or business development team to know the questions that the customers are actually asking and create content on that.
- Pay attention to the content type that is not working with your target audience and either stop doing that in your strategy or try to improve them.
Because Your Content Promotion is Not On Point
Content marketing is not just about content. It’s second half talks about marketing and that is where most people fail. Many people have talented content writers who tell the company stories in a perfect manner while also offering value. But they lack in promoting the content on the right channels.
Your content strategy would definitely not work if you are doing nothing about the content once it has gone live on your website.
How do you expect your users to find the content? Do you expect them to type your blog URL to reach the page? No one would do that, of course.
How will they reach your content? They will reach your content when you know how to promote it.
Take, for example, Robbie Richards, a professional that helps growth-stage SaaS companies with their SEO strategies. His page was just a month old with no backlinks or anything. Yet, he grew his traffic by 272% in just 30 days. How?
Having a content strategy that emphasizes on creating great content and promoting it right. He used Buzzbundle tool, weekly round-ups, forum marketing, etc.
Quick Fixing Tip:
There are some simple and quick tips that can help you improve your content strategy through promotion.
- Send out email newsletters to all your subscribers for your blog posts
- Share each of your blog posts on social media platforms that best suit your business and audience in a very engaging manner. Don’t forget, over 74% of your users are on social media. But make sure you target your content according to social media platforms. LinkedIn for business posts, Instagram for cultural posts, Pinterest for infographics, Twitter for mentioning industry experts, etc.
- When sending out emails to your prospects, you can link your informative posts in the email to give them value and get more traffic on your site.
- Reshare your content on different reposting channels like Medium etc., with your original link as canonical to reach out to wider audiences.
- Answer questions on Quora, Reddit, etc., while linking to your blog post to get interested readers from there.
Because You Aren’t Tracking Content or Wasting Your Data
Data is imperative in today’s world and you need to make complete use of the data that you have to improve your content strategy. Basically, if you are not backing your content strategy with data, you are simply taking the guess-based approach. And that is not going to take you too far.
It is important that you track each piece of content and know the numbers to not just formulate your content strategy but also improvise it accordingly.
The data collected from tracking and analysis of content, marketing campaigns, and other similar things can be very useful in strengthening your content strategy and making it fool-proof.
Quick Fixing Tip:
- Google Analytics, Hubspot Analytics, SEMrush, and many more tools are available to help you analyze your content performance
- Looks at the page views, bounce rates, average session, etc., to see how your content is performing
- See the referral traffic and make sure sharing content there becomes a routine
- Have a monthly report to see where the traffic arrives most and from where. Create content and promotion strategies accordingly.
On an Ending Note
Like having a correct inbound strategy is imperative for digital engagement, a correct and fail-proof content strategy is also crucial for your success. In fact, if done right, your content strategy can get you three times more leads than paid search advertising. All you need to do is find the reasons why it is failing and fix them to succeed.
In this blog, we covered all the major reasons that lead to the failure of content strategy and how you can quickly fix them. You can perform content audits regularly and see ho everything is working out. Once done, implement the quick fixing tips and do not forget to include these implementations in your content documentation as, without it, your strategy would not stand.
Key Takeaways:
- To make your content strategy work, make sure your content is written for humans and well-optimized for search engines.
- Creating just one kind of content would bore your audience. Treat them with variety and serve them with a mix and match of video, blogs, podcasts, infographics, etc.
- The content should always provide value to the readers and compel them to take some action.
- Do not worry if your industry is already dominated. Offering value consistently would help you carve your niche.
- Just pushing down chunks of content on your website wouldn’t suffice. Promoting the content should take an important part of your content strategy.
- You also need to monitor all your content efforts. Otherwise, how would you know what’s working and what’s not? With proper tracking, you can create more value-driven content that will resonate with your customers’ requirements.
The post Content Strategy Not Working? Here are the 6 Reasons Why appeared first on ReadWrite.
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