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Home Blog Content MarketingTop Reasons Content Marketing Fails and How You Can Turn Things Around
Yes, content marketing can fail and, often, it’s because of some simple steps you missed on doing at the planning stages. Thankfully, they’re easy enough to fix.
Digital marketing trends may come and go, but one thing remains: content is still king. Amid search engines becoming more sophisticated and more people going online and mobile, content marketing is essential now more than ever for business success. When you produce high-quality, engaging content consistently, you’re able to directly address the first and most important need of the market: information.
But as much as there’s great emphasis now for this online strategy, the truth is that content marketing fails happen. And when they do, the business is drastically affected. The good news is that often, these marketing fails can be addressed early on — especially when you know what to look for. By learning how to identify potential causes of failure, you can strategically make adjustments, turn things around, and drive your efforts to the path of success.
If you’ve partnered with a content marketing agency, you should be able to evaluate your initiatives every now and then and determine how effective they are. In this article, we’ll be tackling what good content marketing is and why some executions fail.
In a nutshell, good content marketing considers three important factors:
Even with a clear picture of what good content marketing is, a lot of brands find it difficult to see success in their campaigns. More often than not, it starts with a few simple mistakes, which have become overlooked. These are some of the common blunders, the reasons why content marketing fails.
Some marketers simply ride on what’s trending. Others approach marketing with a wait-and-see attitude, putting out different pieces of content and then observing which ones would emerge popular. Yes, these processes can work, but only for a time. Yes, the viral memes did give you precious likes and shares, but what’s next?
Without a clear, sustainable strategy for pushing fans further into the marketing funnel and turning them into customers, your content marketing fails in relation to your ultimate business goal, which is to increase sales and improve investment returns.
How to turn things around: Take a step back and invest time and resources building your digital marketing strategy framework. This will help you come up with executions that follow a process, an organized system. You won’t overlook anything, and you can scale your tactics whenever needed.
At the most basic, your framework must include the essentials: objectives, branding, infrastructure, analytics, content, channels, strategy and execution, and customer experience.
You probably know their gender, age, and marital status, but this surface-level kind of customer knowledge can only get you so far. In fact, the simple act of creating a funny TikTok video will be difficult when you’re out of touch with your customers’ interests, personalities, attitudes, and hobbies.
This blunder can result in other costly mistakes, such as sending the wrong message to your audience or delivering content at the wrong time along the buyer’s journey. On the flip side, you’ll be able to produce meaningful, relevant content, the ones that have the potential to go viral, when you simply understand your customers well.
How to turn things around: Fix your content marketing strategy by crafting a content persona. By gathering demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioral information about your target market, you’ll gain a better understanding of your customers and prevent big, costly marketing fails.
It’s a good habit for marketers to keep creating content, but the work doesn’t stop there. The best blogs and funniest social media posts are nothing if people aren’t seeing it. If the people don’t see it, then they won’t be able to interact with it. When the content isn’t visible, content marketing ultimately fails.
How to turn things around: As much as you put a lot of effort in creating, do your best in promoting content. Exhaust different marketing channels to broaden your audience reach. These are the platforms worth starting off with:
As you recalibrate marketing plans, have a system for promoting posts consistently. Stick to the plan to make sure you’re getting maximum exposure for your content.
Content marketing fails if your social media pages and blog sections are a stream of poor-quality content. The most common, off-putting for audiences are those that are boring, overly promotional, and off-brand. The most damaging effect of bad content, aside from pushing away potential customers, is the negative brand perception. If you don’t want your brand to have a bad reputation, avoid bad content at all costs.
How to turn things around: Fix your content by observing these tips:
Content marketing is not something you can just set and forget. It’s difficult to improve efforts when you’re not experimenting. What’s worse is that in the absence of tests, you could be spending a lot of money on efforts that yield no profitable results.
How to turn things around: Run experiments on your marketing campaigns. Here’s a simple step-by-step guide to follow:
On top of the mentioned above, one of the biggest and most ironic causes of content marketing fails is not knowing that your efforts are actually going south. Without metrics to observe, you’re basically clueless as to the progress of your campaign.
Before you roll out anything, it’s important to decide on metrics that will track and measure your performance. These metrics should be anchored on objectives. Here’s an overview of important content marketing metrics:
Your content has to get maximum exposure before you’re able to make business. The traffic metrics look at how many people your content has reached. It covers:
Your content has to make a connection with your audience for them to be compelled to do business with you. The engagement metrics measure the impact of your content. It covers:
Your content must not just be visible and impactful for the audience. The conversion metrics measure how many people were compelled to take concrete action after consuming your content. Depending on your marketing goal, conversion metrics include:
The ideal CLTV to CPA ratio is 1:1. If it goes higher, say, 4.5:1, you may not be spending enough for your campaign to attract high-quality leads or customers.
Content is king. Bad content kills. Beware of the reasons content marketing fails so you can avoid them at all costs. As you review your efforts, keep in mind these insights:
Have you experienced content marketing fails yourself? How did you turn things around? Share it to us via our social media channels: Facebook, X, or LinkedIn.
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