Why doesn’t content marketing work? You spend money, you hire authors and editors, you write articles, but the clients and benefits don’t add up. The problem here is not content marketing itself, but the approach.
In this article, the expert writers from Essaysadvisor company have compiled the top 9 mistakes most commonly made in content marketing. We’ll tell you how to fix them to make it work.
Mistake #1. Content without a product
Content marketing is thought of as a magic pill that sells anything. But if you’re selling an iron that only irons at 40 degrees in the moonlight, and it has a short cord, no amount of content marketing will help you. You just can’t make convincing content with an unfinished product, and if someone believes you and buys it, you’ll quickly drown in a barrage of negative feedback.
Without a sales organization, content marketing won’t help either. Posts and texts “warm up” customers and they’re ready to buy, but if you don’t have an auto-funnel set up, a shopping cart on your site, and no well-trained managers, sales won’t go.
How to do it right: Work out the product, make it appealing to customers, develop a unique selling proposition, set up the sales process-and only then take on the content.
Mistake #2. Untargeted audience
At first glance, it seems that you need to create content for the widest possible audience: all women, all men, or even all of the world’s population. Then the reach will be huge and you’ll get millions of responsive readers. But content “for everyone” doesn’t work for three reasons:
- One piece of content can’t appeal to everyone at once and be relevant to everyone. You’ll have to use terms, language, and examples that a certain audience understands, and the article will be boring and uninteresting to another. Trying to please everyone will not please anyone.
- You won’t have regular readers. If you produce materials for one and another audience, you won’t have people who are waiting, constantly reading and commenting on your articles. Without such an appreciative regular audience, you’ll have to spend a lot of money on advertising to attract a new audience.
- Readers won’t be your customers. You can try to make content for everyone, but your product is probably only for a certain audience. That means you’ll attract millions of people to the content, but they won’t bring you any money from product purchases.
How to do it right: You need to write for potential buyers. To do this, define a clear target audience for your product and create customer-oriented content. Let it not be for millions, but thousands or even hundreds of people. But each of them is your potential customer.
Mistake #3. Content marketing when you don’t need it
Sometimes companies get into content marketing just because it’s trendy and relevant. They spend money on blog articles and social media posts, not realizing that their target audience and product don’t actually need content marketing.
For example, if the main audience of a product is elderly people, they won’t read blog articles, use social networks, or watch videos online. And even if the target audience is on the Internet, this doesn’t mean that they need the content. Maybe they will be more interested in information about promotions and discounts, products description – in general, the classical marketing.
How to do it right: Analyze and understand what your target audience needs and fits your goals and resources. Perhaps in your case it is more useful and profitable to arrange promotions, order reviews from bloggers, advertise on TV, sell directly through cold and hot calls.
Mistake #4. Incorrect elaboration of strategy
Sometimes a company decides to do content marketing, but it approaches the question spontaneously: the launch has no specific purpose, the channels are chosen intuitively, the materials are produced occasionally, they are not united by a common theme, and are not tied to newsworthy events. It seems that it is just necessary to “make a content”, because everybody does it, and the readers and buyers will catch up on their own.
As the result, you have a content, but it is unclear why you need it, what benefits it brings and what results the company wanted to achieve. It is not even possible to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing, because there are no criteria for this effectiveness. Usually in that case, content marketing is stopped and disappointed in it.
How to do it right: A strategy is needed, but you should not try to cover everything possible at once. For starters, you can simply think of goals, determine channels and platforms, format, plan for a month’s worth of publications, and start producing content. In the process, experiment, look at the audience’s response and decide how to develop further on this basis.
Mistake #5. Content without sales
Sometimes content marketing is opposed to advertising – saying that everybody is fed up with selling, give people useful content, and they will buy it. As a result of this painstaking work on generating extremely useful content, a blog or a social network gathers a lot of readers. They like and comment on the posts, but it doesn’t affect sales.
How to get it right: Promotions, discounts, great deals and interesting products are just as appealing to people as interesting content. Feel free to remind people that you’re selling something. You can sell a product either in individual posts or right inside useful content. For example, add a link to your product in a feature article.
Mistake #6. Only selling content
Sometimes they cross the line in the other direction – they try to sell something in every post, they shout about their exclusivity, they talk only about the company. They disguise it as useful posts and articles, but in fact such behavior is not content marketing, but advertising.
No one is interested in reading naked advertising, so you won’t get regular grateful readers that way. You will have to spend money on targeting and contextual advertising of your posts in order to at least somehow attract attention to them.
How to do it right: Strike a balance – advertise yourself, but do not forget about the benefits for the reader. Information about products and services can be attached even to each post, but the publication itself should be useful in isolation from advertising. So it would be interesting to read or repost.
Mistake #7. Blogging and social networks without analytics
You need analytics to understand how successful your content marketing is at all. Without minimal analysis, you won’t know what your readers like and how it affects other metrics. Maybe the article you think is the coolest isn’t being read at all.
How to do it right: Connect minimal analytics, such as Yandex.Metrika, to analyze the statistics of views and follow-ups.
Monitor social media activity – check which posts get more likes, reposts, views and comments, and how it all affects sales figures.
Experiment – try different formats, pitches, humor, illustrations, and see what your audience likes best.
Mistake #8. Complex topics without experts
In a perfect world, there are expert authors who know your area of expertise, are great writers, and can generate content on their own. But in practice, it’s rare to find someone who has an in-depth understanding of your topic and can write coherent content.
If a non-expert writer writes an article himself, he will have nowhere to get his information. He will run through open sources, compile the information from them, and produce mediocre material, of which there are thousands on the Internet.
How to do it right: For the article to be in-depth, the author must interview the expert and refine the details in the process of writing. Only in this way will the content be unique and useful to the reader.
Ideally, the experts are experts from the company for which the content marketing is being prepared. But you can bring in outside experts as well, especially if the topic of the article is not directly related to the company.
An article with an expert has another advantage – it inspires more trust. The reader is more likely to believe a professional lawyer or doctor than an author with no medical or law degree. Therefore, if you are writing a medical article, hiring a nursing essay writer is a critical part of content marketing, as they can create high-quality and authoritative articles that readers will trust.
Mistake #9. Expecting quick results
Content marketing seems like a magic pill – plug it in and you immediately get fame, sales and grateful readers. But suddenly it turns out that readers appear slowly, and they are in no hurry to buy. On the links left in the useful content, no one goes, the number of customers is not growing, and the whole Internet for some reason is in no hurry to discuss your new video.
Such drudgery lasts more than one month, and many eventually decide to drop everything and go back to classic marketing. Although they were only a couple of steps away from success and fame.
How to do it right: Eliminate all errors, be patient and wait. At first it will seem that the budget goes nowhere, a little later – that income does not exceed expenses, and only after 3-6 months you will finally see results. And often success comes abruptly – readers suddenly become numerous, everyone around starts talking about the brand, and the site falls under the flow of new visitors and customers.
Content marketing doesn’t bring instant results because it doesn’t involve direct sales and quick profits. This type of marketing is one of the longest paybacks. Sometimes its value cannot be calculated at all. Because the content is designed to work on the company image and user experience, and only they can ultimately affect sales. But it is not a matter of one month.
