Is Your Content Marketing Not Working? Here's the Solution.

Let’s take a look at a few reasons why your content marketing might not be working as well as it could.

1. Your Content Doesn't Relate to Every Stage of the Buyer's Journey

Content marketing is focused on attracting your buyers and helping them through the stages of the buyer’s journey. If you only have content that is helpful for awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, it won’t necessarily be helpful information in the consideration and decision stages.

With content marketing optimization, you can make sure you’re always tying your content creation efforts back to the buyer personas you're targeting and the buyer’s journey they're embarking on.

Building a framework for your content marketing optimization efforts will help your content become relevant and valuable for every stage of the buyer’s journey. Make sure your framework has a clear and repeatable process, which will allow you to produce more content, more efficiently. Putting your team on a schedule for creating content is also helpful.

Your content should be designed based on what stage your buyer persona is in, so empathize with your personas. Put yourself in their shoes and optimize your content so that it speaks to your buyer personas at the right time and in right ways.

2. You Haven't Developed a Growth Marketing Mentality

Growth marketing, according to HubSpot, “is an integrated approach to growing your business and optimizing your content efforts through constant testing across marketing channels.” The goal of growth marketing is to identify new opportunities and to find new ways to communicate with your customers.

Testing and optimizing your content will ensure that you provide your buyers with the most helpful, high-quality content they can find. To get into the growth marketing mentality, you have to understand your marketing funnel (awareness, consideration, decision). You’ll then be able to build a framework that will optimize and improve your marketing funnel.

Running a series of tests and analyzing your marketing metrics will ensure that your content is constantly being optimized across your different marketing channels. Growth is a mindset, and it’s all in the execution to make sure that your company’s growth is successful.

3. Your Content Isn't Engaging Your Potential Customers

Writing and producing quality and engaging content can be really difficult, especially when you’re trying to also sell your product and service. You don’t want to cross the line from trying to help to trying to push your potential customers toward a purchase, at least not early on in their buyer’s journey. Before you start writing and producing your content, you want to plan it around your customer’s journey to make sure that it can create connections with your prospects.

Your content marketing optimization is designed to make a human connection that will resonate with people that need your help or guidance. To do that, you need to empathize with your customers and understand their context. If you tell your story incorrectly, it can deter your prospects. Whenever you are framing your content, keep the audience and the tone in mind.

The character or characters in your story are the connection between your business and your audience. Is the main character you, your business, or your buyer?

Use your buyer personas as a guide to understanding what goals and challenges your characters will face.

Some best content marketing optimization practices when creating your story:

• Use content to create an emotional appeal.
• Keep your story clear and concise.
• Make sure your content consistent and authentic.

Your content should create an emotional appeal to your audience. Emotion is what gives power to your story and engages your potential customers with the values of your business.

4. You're Creating More and Promoting Less, When You Should be Promoting More and Creating Less

Content promotion is how you get your message to the people who need it the most. It will drive your website traffic, improve audience engagement, and aid buyers with their purchase decisions.

Some best practices for content promotion:

• Create a content promotion calendar to help keep track of various types of communications.
• Use segmentation to target a specific audience.
• Customize messaging for each channel.
• Experiment to learn the best way to deliver your content to your audience.
• Optimize to achieve the best possible outcome for your promotion plan.
• Analyze your results to identify ways to enhance future campaign performance.

The key to content promotion is promoting more content then you’re creating. A single blog post won’t do much if it’s just sitting on the internet. But if you share it on social media, send it out in a newsletter, or promote it with an ad, and make sure it's in alignment with your content marketing optimization efforts, it could become a top driver of traffic to your website.

You want to promote your well-performing content in order to connect with new audience members and prospects.

And there you have it. Four reasons your content marketing might not be working, and some content marketing optimization tips on how to fix it.

When you’re doing content marketing, always focus on creating a lasting relationship with your prospects. Keep in mind that the buyer’s journey are essential when creating your content marketing strategy. You want to be producing valuable, relevant, and consistent content that will attract, convert, close, and delight your audience.