You are familiar with the word content marketing, aren’t you?
You hear business owners, bloggers and marketers talk about this every now and then, laying emphasis on how great it is for businesses. But the question is “Do you know what it is and the rudiments surrounding it?”
If your answer is yes, can you confidently say you are doing it the right way?
I always felt I knew how to market my products. I thought it was just all about drafting a quick write-up, taking random pictures, and attaching them to my posts, but I was wrong. Not only did I not get new customers, but I didn’t even make sales as expected.
This is the same for a lot of online small businesses, as they lack the skillset and knowledge needed to effectively carry out a good content marketing strategy, hence the complaints of not making good sales and getting new customers.
In this article, I will try to explain what content marketing is, and how you can use it for your business.
What is Content marketing?
The first thing you need to note is that your customers are wise, and marketing the traditional way doesn’t work anymore. You need to evolve and begin using a different approach, in this case, Content Marketing.
Whenever a startup business owner asks me for advice on how to garner new customers, I always find myself reiterating the need to begin with content marketing especially if they are looking to attract new customers and make more sales. The bitter truth is that if you do not have a strong marketing strategy, it will be almost impossible for you to drive traffic to your site or make massive sales as envisioned.
To simplify the meaning of Content marketing, I always tell business owners that it basically involves creating awareness and educating your target audience about your product or service. While at it, you have to ensure your content is valuable to your audience as that’s the only way to ensure they share and continue visiting your site.
Over time, I have come to realize that a lot of brands do get confused as to the best content marketing strategy to adopt for their business, and then end up settling for strategies that adversely affect rather than promote their business.
At the end of this article, you would have clearly understood why your content marketing strategy isn’t working as well as ways you can improve it.
Shall we?
Reasons why your Content marketing strategy isn’t working
Have you ever asked yourself why your content marketing strategy isn’t working as planned?
Let’s get this straight! Blogging alone isn’t enough to push your business, neither is tweeting your blog post going to fetch you that massive sales you hope to get. You need to doggedly work towards having a solid content marketing strategy if you ever hope to make great sales from your business.
To fully understand why your strategy may not be working, I have made a detailed list of reasons you can go through and highlight the one that best describes your plight.
1. You’re using one tactic
One mistake you may be making is thinking that owning a blog will automatically garner customers and sales to your site. Don’t get me wrong, blogging does drive traffic to a site and acquire customers for bloggers, but the challenge faced by some bloggers is knowing exactly how to present their content in an appealing manner to even get the attention of the audience.
Blogging isn’t as easy as it looks! For a small-scale business owner with little or no skill and time to blog, producing original and value-driven content would seem a herculean task.
If you are looking at adding more value to your content marketing effort without having to come up with in-depth blog posts, you have to try repurposing your content, focusing on converting your older but valuable pieces of content into different formats for your audience. I advise you to repurpose your content using forms like infographics, videos, podcasts, webinars, whitepapers, etc.
2. Frail content
You need to understand that your actual content is the heart of content marketing, and needs to be solid and accurate. This is because having a weak or poorly researched and created content can be disastrous to your business, and never be able to convince people to visit your blog.
You must be wondering what could possibly make your content weak. Well, this isn’t farfetched. Your content may be considered weak if it lacks value, has a boring topic, and lacks fore knowledge of customers’ wants. If you are in the habit of copying just about anyone’s type of content, you are likely to have content with no value. Ask yourself how often you read a particular article. You will notice you don’t do that more than once, except for cogent reasons. Then tell me why you should be using an already written content almost verbatim? Learn to write yours from a different angle, adding other relevant tips not listed in the other work.
Also, if your industry isn’t very popular or interesting, your chances of getting new customers will be very slim. I suggest you try posting interesting and eye-catching content on your blog, coming up with a list of story ideas applicable to your business. You can also blog on success stories, roundup posts, interviews, as I’m very sure they would do well in almost any niche. You can also opt to write educational and informative posts. I also suggest you try out bookmarking sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon if you want to discover topics most loved by people.
Finally, I can tell you for free that it is easier to know what you like than to know what your target audience likes, and this is why as an email marketer, you always need to look at your open rate to assess your audience cravings. Why don’t you try emailing the latest blog post to your subscribers to get an idea of what your audience likes?
I always tell bloggers, both old and new to never underestimate the power of a headline. Always ensure your headline is catchy and interesting as if it is unable to catch your audience’s attention at the first read, best believe they won’t go past reading it. You don’t want to miss out on a lot of site traffic, do you?
I suggest you be specific, use numbers, leave a question unanswered, and deliver promises made via the headline, to ensure your headline comes out perfect and hits its mark.
3. Poor publishing schedule
A terrible mistake you may be making is following write-ups by other people on how to publish your articles, forgetting that they are writing from their own personal experience. Doing this will only make you end up with poorly published content which in turn affects the traffic generated. I advise you to develop a schedule that revolves around you, your blog, and your audience.
4. Lack of content promotion
How can you say your content is topnotch and not promote it? This is a grave mistake I have seen people make. Most bloggers tend to just create content and expect it to excel on its own, mostly because they feel it is superb and should sell. This isn’t always the case as there is always the likelihood of the content never been seen by your target audience.
Always have at the back of your mind that producing a content is one thing, promoting that content is another thing altogether.
Promote your content aggressively. I have come to realize that the best way to promote your content effortlessly is through the use of social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, etc. You can also promote your content and increase your reach using blogger outreach, which involves identifying popular bloggers and influencers and using them to promote your brand.
Final Thoughts
Business blogging is the heart of your content marketing strategy, and you always need to ensure you have valuable content for your audience.
I advise you focus on increasing your audience by targeting several social media channels. If you are looking at promoting your content via social media platforms, you have to identify the platform most ideal for your brand and which will definitely increase your sales and drive massive traffic to your site.
Finally, content marketing isn’t so hard. You just need to focus on publishing uniquely educating and entertaining content to increase your engagement and generate massive revenue.