All business owners should know by now how vital content marketing is for growing your business. Despite the best intentions of many business owners, they are still getting their content marketing wrong. However, most of the time this is easy to fix.
That is what we’ll be exploring in this post; how you can discover and cure 9 common content marketing problems.
Problem 1: Lack of Direction and Focus
Lack of direction and focus is a common one but it’s easy to fix. If you don’t have a clear focus and direction with your content marketing strategy then you are going to struggle to attract the kind of customers you want to your business.
The Cure: Before you ever begin your content marketing strategy be clear about the following:
Who your ideal customers are
What your goals are with each piece of content you produce
How you can use the content to build your brand and position your company in the hearts and minds of your ideal client
If you know all of this then you will have a clear direction and focus for your content marketing, and it will help you decide where is the best places to publish your content.
Problem 2: Lack of Integration With Company and Your Audience
The whole company needs to be in sync and working together collectively with what you are trying to achieve. If not then your audience will not receive the kind of content that will be most beneficial to them.
The Cure: Make sure there is tight integration between your company and the content you’re sharing with your audience. If you do this then you will develop a far more coherent and effective content marketing strategy that benefits your audience.
Problem 3: Compromising On Quality For Speed
Don’t rush into responding to an event, trends, or any other kinds of issues. It’s when you respond hastily to these kinds of things that mistakes are made because quality ends up being compromised for speed of response.
The Cure: This one is pretty simple to fix. Just take your time. Don’t rush to respond to something, take your time to make a calculated response and you’ll avoid the problems that come with hasty responses.
Problem 4: Being Irrelevant or Inauthentic or Even Worse
Both - This is a big one. Being irrelevant or inauthentic with your content is one of the quickest ways to lose subscribers, customers, and to not even get your ideal customers in the first place. You need to be focusing on what it is that your target audience wants and delivering high quality content to them.
The Cure: This can be solved in a number of ways:
By using analytics software to determine what is popular on your site and what content is being shared socially.
Looking at what is successful on your competitors‘ sites, where they are meeting their customers‘ needs and where they’re not.
Be genuine and personal with your content. Be real when you write to your audience. Write to them as if they’re human beings and you’ll stand out from the rest of the competition who are writing dry and dreary content.
Problem 5: Being Too Branded
You need to have a brand and you need to display this brand. However, it’s important to not go overboard with it. Lightly branded content is the way to go rather than a full on branding approach. This is because consumers are ignoring anything that looks like an ad and lightly branded content has also been shown to perform better.
The Cure: Don’t make branding the sole focus. Make producing highly useful and relevant content the focus to avoid making this problem.
Problem 6: You Still Focus on Old Style SEO
It’s amazing how many people are still using old style SEO - using content that is keyword based and focused on links. SEO is vital for the growth of your business but your content needs to do much more than just show up in search engines. It also needs to be so good that people who find you through SEO end up staying on your site and coming back time and time again.
The Cure: Focus on producing long, informative, high quality content. This is the kind of content that will keep people on your site and is also much more likely to go viral.
Problem 7: You Are Too Preoccupied With Timing
Many people get far too preoccupied with when is the best time to post content on social media. However, your focus should always be quality over the timing of when to post.
The Cure: Focus on producing high quality content over the best time to share content on social media. If you are consistently producing high quality content then the timing doesn’t necessarily matter because people will be more likely to share your content anyway.
Problem 8: You Focus On Too Many Marketing Channels
If you are trying to create content on every different platform then you are going to end up spreading yourself too thin. You will run out of time and you won’t end up gaining the kind of traction you need necessary for growth.
The Cure: Focus on producing high quality content and then spread it across all of your social networks. What you should do is simply repurpose your content across your various platforms. This way you are still producing high quality content that is ideal for all of your platforms. You can make graphics, infographics, quote graphics, and much more. This is far more effective than trying to produce content that is vastly different across all of your platforms.
Problem 9: You’re Not Using CTAs
CTAs (Call To Actions) are one of the most important components for your content. You need to tell people what to do when they read, watch, or listen to your content. They aren’t going to do anything unless you tell them to do so.
The Cure: Direct people’s actions with a CTA. Tell them what you want them to do at the end of a blog post, video, etc. It could be something as simple as telling them to sign up to your email list if they found your content useful. It’s little things like this that can increase your ROI over the long term.
Conclusion
Content marketing is vital to the success of any business online but it needs to be done properly for it to be effective. The problems listed above tend to be some of the most common content marketing problems but they are all easy to fix.
Fix these problems immediately if you are committing any of them and you’ll start seeing better results from your content marketing.
What problems have you noticed with your content marketing efforts?
Christian Michaels