Although content marketing is an essential for doing business online, there are also a number of reasons why your efforts in this arena may have fallen flat.
Once upon a time, bricks and mortar businesses relied on strategies like word of mouth and print advertising to attract new customers. Fast forward twenty years, and times have certainly changed. There’s no denying that we now live in a digital world, and the importance of a strong presence on the internet has seen many owners scrambling to jump on the bandwagon.
When juggling social media, SEO and blogging, it’s easy to get overwhelmed when it comes to using content marketing as a tool to organically grow your brand online. As an alternative to pay per click advertising, producing and marketing content is often a long game and harder than most people originally think.
Despite their best efforts, many brands and businesses grow disheartened with content marketing when they don’t see any reward for their investment. While some rookie mistakes tend to happen more than others, the good news is that they are easily rectified for those willing to do the work.
Six Reasons Why Your Content Marketing Missed The Mark
For those unfamiliar with the term, content marketing is a form of advertising that focuses on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online, such as SEO, blogs, videos and even social media posts – a brand or business essentially creates their own content, before going on to market that content to the masses.
Not only does content marketing help to solidify your brand’s presence on search engine results, but it can also be distributed across social media channels as a way to supercharge traction. While content marketing is ultimately designed to beef your website up in all the right ways, there are many reasons why a brand’s efforts might ultimately fail.
Quantity Over Quality – While consistency is important, posting clickbait three times a week just for the sake of it will ultimately damage your brand’s online reputation. Social media posts that are self serving, or online articles that are too short or not properly optimised will do more harm to your business than good. Instead, focus on quality and reduce the frequency if need be.
Audience Is Too Broad – If you’re casting your net too wide, there are two scenarios that might happen: you’re either getting seen by everybody with little to no engagement, or you’re drowning in the competition and not getting seen at all. Instead, aim to find a niche market, and scale down your content marketing to people that your message will actually resonate with.
Using The Wrong Channels – If you manage or run your own brand, maintaining a presence on social media can more often than not feel like a waste of your time – however, you might be using the wrong platform for business. If you’re marketing products via e-commerce, try Instagram. If you’re offering a professional service, try LinkedIn.
No Content Strategy – Many industry professionals view paid advertising and content marketing as two entirely separate arenas. In truth, they are – but if you’re trying to make your mark online, they can actually have a symbiotic relationship that won’t break the budget. As such, having a clear strategy in place is a must if you want to yield real results.
Using The Same Formats – Are you guilty of using your company’s Facebook page once a week just to post a meme that neither you or your customers really care about? The most successful content marketing efforts require a coordinated approach, so be sure to upload a Reels to Instagram that tie in with your latest blog post on your company’s website.
Not Adding Any Value – If you are consistently publishing content that offers no real value, you’re ultimately doing yourself a disservice. Regardless of whether the resources you provide include information, how-to guides or even answers to common FAQs, it’s important to give your audiences a reason to keep coming to you without your brand expecting anything in return.
Even for the most seasoned of business owners, keeping up with these types of digital technology is not the most efficient way to use their time, energy and resources. Instead, many opt to outsource this digital responsibility to a reputable content marketing agency, or a group of industry professionals that specialise in this space and create content that is both engaging, and ‘Google friendly’.
If you lack the time, energy or experience to successfully harness content marketing for online lead generation, the good news is that it’s never been more affordable to offload this task to the experts – but where do you find them?
The Key To Good Branding Is Great Content
Here at Content Hive, producing top quality digital content is exactly what we do best. We have itemised a list of digital content services, and allocated credits next to each of these. This means that each month, you can use your credits with us to produce digital content such as blog articles, social media posts, videos and even animated Instagram stories. By using this model, we believe that it enables us to produce high quality content with faster delivery times.
If you aren’t quite sure where to start on your digital marketing journey and would like to speak to a professional, why not book in a free discovery call with us at Content Hive today to discuss how we can get your brand buzzing online.
