However, too many brands fail to utilize this technique properly, which can be caused by many reasons.
1. Not understanding your audiences
If you want to target the right audiences at the right time, you definitely need to understand your audiences. Who they are? How old are they? And what are the things they care about most? Only when you answer these questions correctly, you will know what contents are suitable for your audiences.
The strategy starts with defining buyer personal characteristics and identifying questions they ask during their buying process. More importantly, you need to identify your customers’ problems and use your content to offer solutions they are looking for. Then, create the contents based on these principles.
Many businesses failed at delivering content to their audiences because they don’t understand their audiences.
According to a recent research, 87 percent of brands struggle to create content that customers will be interested in and want to share on their personal social accounts. Only a small number of people really enjoy the content offered by the business that they followed.
For example, your target audiences are people who care about electronics and technology, you should focus on this field to create valuable contents, such as technology trends or review mobile phones.
Some online businesses can produce some controversial topics to attract readers, but this information are not valuable for these businesses, which can lead to the ruin of their content.
2. Too many promotional information on your site
Content marketing is not just about advertising, it’s also a way to connect your customers. If your audiences are bombarded by a dozen of promotional articles, they will feel your site boring and skeptical about your service/product.
You’ve probably heard that too much of anything can be bad for you, and this is certainly true of promotions, which let your audiences leave your site immediately, not enough time to convert anything or bounce without entering any other pages. People don’t want to read your sales pitch. They want something that delivers actual value to their lives.
Promotional content is an important part of content marketing, but successful brands will know the frequency of producing promotions on their sites, because they acknowledge the importance of engaging with their audience. Promotional messages should be cultivated by many other useful articles.
3. Your content is boring
Producing content for your audience that attracts traffic, inspires shares, and ends in conversion is not an easy task. Even your content is valuable to your audience, they still don’t like your content. Have you ever asked yourself why it is or how to overcome this struggle? The answer can lie on content building.
One of the most reasons your audiences neglect your content is because they feel it boring. The article can be too long with no image, boring headline and no call to action, and so on.
You can create the best piece of content on the Internet, but it will be meaningless if your audiences don’t notice it. Failing to use attention-grabbing headlines and calls to action is a major mistake. You only have two seconds to attract your audience and convince them to click on your article.
Many audiences base on headline and some lines of description to decide whether they continue reading or not. Therefore, you need to optimize your headline properly to engage readers and encourage them to pay attention to the rest of the content. There are some tips you can follow to create a powerful headline for your content:
- Use power words that prompt curiosity with your readers.
- Make sure your headlines are long enough to draw attention and convey your message to your readers.
In addition, don’t forget to use images in your article to demonstrate for everything you said.
4. Frequency of releasing content
How often you release your content on your site? 1 article a day or 10 articles per day? In the morning or in the afternoon? You need to create a plan for content marketing to ensure that your content is frequent and consistent.
Frequency refers to how often you publish. Get yourself or your team on schedule, such as 6 new blog posts per week. Consistency means you keep up with the strategy you’ve laid out. You don’t publish 4 new blogs a week for 2 weeks, then abandon your blog for 1 month. Your consistency now is ended.
Frequency and consistency are very important because you are building the long term relationship between your audiences through content marketing. When your readers have a habit of going to your site to update news, get information, you need to make sure its stability.
If the first time they come to your site, there is no new articles published, they might come again, but if this is third or fourth, you will lose your readers.
5. Lack of ideas
Having a blog and an audience is all good. But keeping audience comes back to your site frequently is more important. You need to create a valuable content which was generated by ideas.
However, if you lack ideas or don’t create something unique, this will result in failure as you create something that has already been done before or copy articles on the Internet and then publish on your site. It can be a good source of information with a huge amount of useful articles.
But, it can also destroy your content because audiences don’t like something old and similar to other articles published before on the Internet.
In conclusion
The Content Marketing Institute says: “Your customers don’t care about you, your products and your services… they care about themselves, their wants and their needs. Content marketing is about creating interesting information your customers are passionate about so they actually pay attention to you.”
