3 Reasons Your Content Marketing Is Not Working And What You Can Do About It

Have you invested time and energy into create content for your website and marketing campaigns only to see little to no results? In this video, I’ll share with the 3 main reasons your content is most likely failing. So, if you’re ready to get a great return on your content investment check out the video below.

Video Transcript:

Hey, thanks for checking out this video. If this is your first time watching or maybe you’ve been watching a while and you have not yet subscribed to our channel, please do so now. We publish new content each and every week to help you get the most out of your marketing activities. All right, so we want to talk about content marketing and specifically why it might not be working for you. As you all are probably aware, you know, you hear the quote all the time, “Content is king. Content is king.” Well, the reality is that if you’re just posting content for the sake of posting, it’s not doing anything for you. And a lot of people get frustrated where they start their content marketing strategy, they begin posting content, they don’t get the results they want. So then they stop and then they see something else and they try that and that doesn’t work and then they stop.

But the reality is there are reasons why content works and there are reasons why content doesn’t work. I’ve learned a lot about what to do and not to do by making mistakes, but then also constantly trying to learn how to be better. I may not be the best copywriter in the world, but I know from my continuing learning that if you continue to tweak and learn and grow, you can do exponentially better each and every time. So let’s get into some of the reasons why our content might not be working and then what we can do about it.

So the first is your headline suck. Now, the term suck is kind of funny, but my physics teacher in high school used to say, Nothing sucks. It either pushes or pulls,” which I also think applies to this too. Your content is either going to push people away or it’s going to pull them in and it’s your headline that’s going to do that.

Copy Blogger, says, “On average, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest of your content.” So five times as many people, or four times as many people on this specific example are going to read your actual headline, but only a fraction of them are going to read your content. And why? It’s because that title is either going to bring them into your content or they’re going to keep scrolling. So we need to pay attention and focus on our headlines because they are probably the most important part of any advertisement, any piece of content that we create. If our headline doesn’t pull them in, they’re gone. And we only get a fraction of a second to do this.

Now, how do we create better headlines? They need to sell our idea. They need to sell our idea fast. And so we want to create headlines that grab attention. A couple of things that you can think about. Do your headlines promise a benefit to your readers? Why would they read this piece of content? What are you going to do with them? Sometimes people try to be too creative and they have this really obscure headline and honestly, people read it and go, “I don’t have time to figure that out.” So they just leave because there’s nothing in it for them.

Another thing that can help, are they timely? This is helpful when it comes to news. Is there something that’s timely that can help them right now? People, we tend to be in the moment instead of thinking long term. Are they going to provide that benefit now? And then clear and descriptive. I think there’s a big movement right now to have shorter headlines, you know, shorter, quick, I see this a lot in design type things, but the reality is it needs to be clear and descriptive. It doesn’t have to technically be short. There’s a number of long headlines that work well.  There’s a lot of research that shows longer headlines do better than shorter headlines. Again, because you’re setting that expectation up front, if it’s clear and it’s descriptive, you have time to promise that benefit to your end readers. Take time, slow down, focus on creating better headlines.

The next reason your content fails is its lack of targeted promotion. So, the statistic here says that 27% of marketers are actually using content syndication or promotional tools. So you want to grow your own organic views. That’s important. But one of the fastest ways to grow your audience is to leverage other people’s audiences. You can do this through content, agreements and arrangements with other bloggers, with other industry leaders, maybe creating case studies, that sort of thing. But you can also do syndication, which is a great way to grow brand awareness.

You want to look for sites in your niche that accept syndication, like, will they syndicate your blog? Will they take your content, pull it from a feed and show it on their site? Now, a lot of the sites that do that don’t worry about duplicate content. They do no-follow. They usually typically do canonical links, like Medium does that. It allows you to get your content to a wider audience. People that might not know your site exists. You also want to look for sites that may accept guest posts. So they don’t do syndication, maybe they’ll let you create content for their site.

Now, they have to have a large enough audience for this to be worth your time and energy and they also need to be marketing themselves. So some of the sites that we syndicate on, they also have a huge email list. And they’ll push our content to their email list and it helps grow our awareness. Now a lot of that content is pushing them back to their specific site, but they’re still reading our content and they’re seeing our links to our site. They’re seeing the connection to our brand. And that’s allowed us to grow our own visibility. I highly recommend this. Take some time to do your research and find people you can partner with to grow your own visibility.

So the last reason why content doesn’t work is this, people don’t have a strategy. It says that 45% of content is produced ad-hoc, which means people are randomly publishing stuff or maybe waking up and saying, “I should write a blog today,” and so they do, but really it’s not a good piece of content.

Spray and pray doesn’t work. You have to have a plan you need to follow through on that plan. If you’re throwing content out there, very likely you’re not going to have people stick with it and engage with you long term. I’ve said this before in videos, I’m going to say it again, when I started out, I created three pieces of targeted content each week for an entire year before I saw the results that I was looking for personally.

It takes time and it takes consistency and you have to make sure that you set yourself up for success early or it’s really easy to quit on these things. So your content strategy needs some basic things like which form of content can you produce, and I would say regularly, is it articles? Is it videos? Podcasts? Whatever. This is a great place to start because it’s going to play on your strengths. Then you have to think about how often you want to release your content, but also how often your readers would expect content from you. You know, when it comes to marketing, or sales, or start-up industries, that sort of thing. You could probably see yourself writing a little bit more frequently because it’s moving fast paced, things change all the time.

But maybe if it’s an older industry, you might not need content every day. People always are saying, “More content, more content,” but the reality is if you can’t keep up with it and the content is not good, you shouldn’t do more. You should do less and you should make it better. Your buyer persona. So this goes back to kind of target audience. Who are you writing for? Make sure that you’re writing for your specific audience, that you’re addressing their pain points. And finally make sure you have key performance indicators so you know what’s working. Are you growing or not? You know you need to be able to track where you are, where you’re headed, that’s going to help make sure that you know what you’re doing is working.

To recap, make sure that your headlines are really good. That’s the most important thing. Take time to make sure that they’re good. Two, make sure that you’re leveraging other ways to promote your content other than your site and your social channels. Three, create a really good content strategy. My team worked really, really hard on this offer, and it’s The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing For Business Growth. This is a free guide. You can go to our site, you can download this free guide. You can get all the templates and you can start putting this to practice.

It’ll cost you zero dollars. You might get some marketing emails from us, but you can always opt out of those. But I highly recommend you check them out, because we try to provide you with targeted information. This guide is free. Download it, use it, start building a plan and start getting to work. If you’ve got any questions, let us know.

Me and my team put this together. They spent a lot more time on it, did a lot of research on it. It’s an awesome thing. This is stuff that we use each and every day, each every week at our own agency. So if you have any questions about it, just let us know. We would love to help you out. And until next time, Happy Marketing.