Five Mistakes That are Holding Your Content Marketing Back

Content marketing can be an extremely effective and powerful marketing tool when it’s used right. But for many businesses, content marketing ends up draining marketing funds without producing any measurable results. If you’ve started content marketing and have yet to see results from it, chances are you’re making at least a few of the following mistakes.

You’re not using the right tools

If you have a smaller business and you or an employee is trying to create and share content all alone, you’re not going to be as effective as you could be without the right tools. Platforms like HootSuite, Zoho, Buffer, Active Campaign, MailChimp and BuzzSumo are easy to use and can help content marketers automate some of the processes involved in creating and sharing content. They can also give additional insight into the effectiveness of various content channels and what competitors are doing.

You’re not promoting it

The disembodied voice in Field of Dreams that tells Kevin Costner’s character “If you build it, they will come” clearly didn’t have any experience in marketing. Business owners of all people should know that simply having a great product or service doesn’t guarantee success. The same goes for content marketing. First-time content marketers often think that if they’re publishing good content, people will come seeking it. While some might accidentally stumble across it while searching for keywords that are in a particular blog article or YouTube video, most potential content consumers will never see your content if you don’t promote it. Your existing customer base is a great place to start. Use existing marketing channels like SMS or email that you’re already using to stay in touch with your most loyal customers and encourage them to check out your company blog or your YouTube channel or your Facebook page or any other platforms you’re using to share content. They in turn can share your content with their friends and family that they think might be interested and they can be excellent (and free) advocates for your content.

You’re not testing and adjusting

If your content marketing efforts aren’t working in their current form, it’s not the end of the world. You can make adjustments. But you won’t know which adjustments are working and which ones aren’t if you aren’t keeping a close eye on the metrics as you experiment. Create multiple landing pages and see which ones lead to the best conversion rates. Do some A/B split testing with different headlines to see which ones attract the most clicks.

Write up a few different versions of opt-in forms to see which ones get you the most SMS or email subscriptions. Getting permission to text or email people directly gives you another channel for sharing content with those people. Never stop testing and adjusting; your content strategy can always improve.

You’re not striving for high quality content

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that people aren’t going to keep reading/viewing the content you’re sharing if it’s not particularly good. Every single minute, another 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.

Every day millions of new blog posts are published online. Most of that content is mediocre or flat-out terrible. You can greatly increase your chances of people following your content channels if you take a lot of pride in the creation of content. Promotion of content may get you a lot of unique visitors but it won’t get you a following unless you’re publishing content that is high quality. High quality is a difficult term to define but the easiest way to put it is that your content should be offering real value to people who view or read it.

You’re not studying the competition

The effectiveness of your content marketing will depend in large part on what your competition is doing, and more specifically, what you’re doing to differentiate yourself from the competition. However niche your industry, there are other companies that are in it and doing content marketing and their audience and your target audience probably have a lot of overlap. Keeping an eye on your competition can help you see what they’re doing content marketing-wise to be successful and it may give you some insight into something they’re not doing that you can do to entice some of their audience to follow your brand.

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Source: entrepreneur.com/article/293197

Eight Things Your Small Business Needs To Be Doing To Increase Content Marketing Engagement

The goal of any content marketing campaign isn’t to get readers to read any one specific article, you want to create loyal followers of your brand who will await every new article or video you publish, who will share your content with friends and family across various social media platforms. To create this kind of user engagement with the content you publish, you need to do more than just create awesome content. Here are eight other things you need to be doing.

Faster loading times for webpages

In marketing lingo, the bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website after viewing just one page on that site. Ideally, when someone ends up on a blog article, they read another and another. Or even better, they go to other parts of your website to learn more about your brand and maybe check out your products. The bounce rate doubles when load times increase from one second to six seconds. People don’t want to stick around if they have to wait more than a few seconds every time they try to click over to another page.

Mobile website load times

If you think load times are important, on traditional websites, it’s nothing compared to the importance of load times on mobile websites. Half of website visitors bounce after a load time exceeds three seconds. Mobile users are less patient than their desktop/laptop counterparts.

A high quality, mobile friendly website

Even if your content is attracting people to your page, they’ll have a negative opinion of your brand if the quality of your site doesn’t measure up to the quality of your content. Your site needs to be well designed, following principles of symmetry and organization but also contrast with an attractive color scheme. Your site should be easy to navigate so that the most important things are displayed prominently. You either need a completely separate mobile version of your website or at the very least, a responsive design site that will properly display your website on mobile devices. Images need to be of a high quality–no stock photos and no low resolution images that will appear blurry on larger screens.

A second set of eyeballs

Establishing trust is a huge part of content marketing. You want readers of your blog to see you as a reliable source of good information. If your content has typos or mechanical/grammatical errors, it reflects badly on your brand even if the content itself is solid. Even if you’re choosing to tackle the content marketing yourself, you should be paying someone else to proofread it before publishing.

Clear key performance indicators (KPIs)

One of the challenging things about content marketing is that it can be hard to measure the direct effects that your content marketing efforts are having on your brand. Part of the problem is that many companies start a company blog because they know it’s what they’re supposed to do but they don’t really know why and what they’re trying to accomplish. A good content marketing strategy will have well-defined key performance indicators that are monitored to track effectiveness of the content marketing. If new customers are what you’re after, then unique visitors is going to be a more important metric than total website visits. If a solid, loyal customer base is the goal, then fewer unique visitors and higher overall website visits is what you’re striving for.

Cast a wider net

Just because you’re publishing great content, it doesn’t mean your target audience is finding it. You need to make sure your content is reaching the people you’re targeting. You may need to do some influencer and affiliate marketing so that bloggers social media personalities with a more established viewership can help you get recognized.

More channels

Another way to cast a wider net is to diversify the channels you’re using to publish content. The company blog on the the company webpage is often the only form of content marketing that a company invests in when this should be seen as just one part of a wider effort. Video content can be uploaded to Youtube or directly to social media platforms. Live streams, tutorials, infographics, and even micro-content sent via SMS are all great ways to diversify your content marketing and reach a wider audience. You can even recycle some of your content to reuse it on various channels.

A “you’re-never-finished” attitude

Even when you’re pleased with the results you’re seeing from your content marketing efforts–you’re getting plenty of web traffic, customers are coming back for more, and your posts are being “liked,” commented on, and shared across social media platforms, you can’t stop improving your content marketing efforts. You should always be paying attention to metrics and fine-tuning your strategy.

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Source: inc.com/molly-reynolds/7-impactful-ways-to-increase-content-engagement.html