6 reasons why your content marketing isn’t working

It feels like it’s past it’s peak, hype-wise, though the coronavirus situation of 2020 has led to many brands turning to more long-term sustainable marketing strategies to win their customers, as Google trends shows.

It makes sense. Compared to the high-cost, adrenaline-pumping rush of more direct PPC or influencer marketing, ‘soft” content can keep on giving right through a pandemic. Though it’s often a long slog, leading to businesses quite often giving up, or using the old ‘we’ve tried that and it didn’t work for us’ bollocks 🙄.

I’ve used content in my digital marketing strategies for the last eight years, sometimes with great success, but with occasionally failings/learnings. So here’s my experience of ‘how not to do content marketing’ for you in six simple bullet points.

1. Lack of focus 

I’ve talked about this one before, but focus can definitely be a problem at a micro level regarding content marketing.

When it comes to your blog/content strategy, what’s your specialty? If your answer is ‘cars’ or ‘fashion’, try again. Unless you’ve got a content team bigger than the New York Times desk… 

At SMEs in particular, where one person might be smashing out content ‘when they’ve got time’, having a clear focus in terms of topical areas is critically important. It’d be nice to cover your entire industry through thought leadership, how-tos, and product guides (for starters!), but there’s literally not enough time in the world.

Always think: ‘why would anyone read my piece of content over the likely hundreds other posts on the topic’. Play on your USPs, and channel your efforts in a specific niche (until you’ve got a bigger content team at least), and you’re much more likely to see success. In all walks of life.

Takeaway: find your very specific niche, and own it. You can’t take it all on.

2. You don’t have a strategy

If I had a quid for every time I heard a business approach ideation by ‘throwing it out there’ and seeing what sticks, I’d be able to start a content marketing agency of my own. 

It’s a far too common approach that ‘this week’s blog’ is simply ‘whatever someone thought was a good idea’. It happens in fluffy marketing agencies, and it happens in-house by less digitally switched-on marketers.

As with web copy on your key service/product pages, and your outbound content, your blogs need to have, at least:

• a target audience in mind
• a desired end goal
• ideally, some means of attracting some inbound traffic

91% of content on the internet receives zero inbound traffic from search engines. It’s unsurprising. Some really basic, top-level keyphrase research when deciding on your content plan will go a long, long way. What is your audience interested in?

Takeaway: plan your blog content around queries that search engines receive, but make sure your content is aligned with wider business goals.

3. You’re not consistent

In my role as a content marketer, as well as a day-to-day blogger, I receive constant requests from aspiring bloggers and publishers – ‘have you got any tips?’…

Now I’ll be able to give them a link to this post. But previously, I’ve simply said, “don’t give up”. 

Dozens of times, I’ve seen blogs started with the best of intentions. Lots of activity for a short while. “This is exciting!”. And then it dies dead. You’ll notice the same on company blogs, news, insight sections. It often looks like the company has stopped trading.

I’m not sure if it’s a lack of results, boredom, or inability to keep plugging away at what matters. But content marketing is a long-term game. You’ve gotta keep at it.

Takeaway: publish with consistency, and stick to it until you get your results. It might take 100 posts before you get into your groove, and find the content that sticks.

4. You need to know where the ceiling is

I love content marketing. Especially as an intrinsic part of an SEO strategy. I’ve written blogs and thought ‘hey that was OK, should bring in some long-tail traffic’ go on to actual convert paying customers right after their first touchpoint with a brand. 🤯

That’s one far end of the spectrum, but it shows that it can work.

However, be realistic in your expectations, and make sure the objectives are very clear with any senior management. Content marketing is incredibly resource intensive, and getting the pay off will never be as fast as just turning on some Facebook Ads. If you’re only allocated to spend one afternoon every fortnight producing one piece of content, you’re gonna publish AT BEST 26 posts. Compare that as a % of time spent on other marketing tasks and work out the pay off. 

Is it that you’re spending 75% of your time on outbound, and just one afternoon here and there on content? Your expected output should be a product of input.

Takeaway: you’ll get out what you put in, but be realistic about time invested vs. payout based on your business and niche.

5. You’re not measuring success

This one is the flip side of not planning, having a strategy, and not using data for content planning. So you’ve done that, and are publishing regularly, and really getting into it. Your blog might even be bringing in traffic right from the top of the SERP. But is it working for you?

Knowing what to measure is critical to your content marketing success. Whether your aim is softer brand awareness, newsletter subscriptions, social following, or hard revenue, it needs to be properly measured. Otherwise you’re just putting words out there for the fun of it. And I’ve seen far too may Google Analytics accounts showing blogs that have taken hours to write, and received just 4 or 5 views. Grim reading.

There’s a bucketload of approaches you could take – be it simple Google Analytics measurements like time on page, or bounce rate, Hotjar recordings, Qualtrics, and everything in between.

Takeaway: no matter how ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ a metric you choose, have a measure of success for your blogging strategy – before you ever write your first word.

6. You’ve got no value proposition

This one is pretty straightforward, but can be symptomatic of a much more wide-reaching problem. If you’re blogging with consistency, a target audience in mind, writing search engine optimised content, and people are still not engaging with you, why is that?

More often than not, I’ve found it’s simply because you don’t have a clear proposition. Why should the reader care?

Have you also conveyed that you’re the industry leader in the topic? Or that you have a special offer on the topic they’ve just been reading about? Or even just that you publish similar, useful, interesting content every week?

Sometimes this can be communicated in a simple outro, or call to actions within your piece. Sometimes it’s more about your overall branding and your business USP. If the user has read your post but has no other reason to engage with you, you’re missing a trick.

Takeaway: once you’ve got the reader’s attention, give them a clear reason to stick around

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I strongly believe content marketing is a tactic that can be employed by any business in order to attract new customers. I’m still a sucker for the old cliche that ‘content is king’. The problem comes when marketers believe their English Lit degree means they’re a content marketer. There’s a lot more to seeing success through content than just dotting the Is and crossing the Ts.

If you need help planning, writing, and measuring success of your blogs, give me a shout here.