Failure isn’t a bad thing. Failure is a path to success.
Failure becomes a bad thing when you repeat the mistakes of people who have been there before you.
A lot of individuals and businesses have failed in content marketing.
Their content marketing campaigns were a disaster and total waste of money and time. Yours shouldn’t be.
You have the opportunity to do things right.
In this article, you’ll learn how to prevent your content marketing campaign from failure. Because you don’t have to fail.
Content marketing is challenging. You have to come up with original ideas on a regular basis.
You have to create engaging content prospects want to read and share with their friends. Creating engaging content is the biggest challenge marketers face.
Companies like P&G, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and John Deere still invest in content marketing. It’s because it works.
Content marketing will always be effective because it’s not about you. It’s about what you can give customers.
It’s about creating relevant and valuable content they want to read rather than selling your products or services.
In today’s world, marketing is impossible without content. That is why you need content. That is why you must get it right.
How do you ensure that your content marketing campaign is successful?
What are the things you should do?
Know your why
Before anything, know your “why” for doing content marketing.
Content marketing is a tough activity.
You have to create content, promote your content, maintain active social media accounts, build relationships with influencers, and a lot more.
It’s easy to forget the reason why you’re doing content marketing in the first place.
That is why you should know your why before you start.
Don’t copy anyone’s “why.” Another business’s “why” may not work for you.
I’ve seen individuals whose reasons for doing something is another reason why someone else hates it.
Your why keeps you focused. It keeps your energy level high.
There are six common reasons business owners give for investing in content marketing:
1. Brand awareness
Some businesses want to do content marketing because they want people to talk about them.
The business owners want their brands to be influential and thought-leader in their niches.
2. Lead generation
Content marketing is the perfect medium to collect leads.
If you’re creating great content, people will want to subscribe to your newsletter, download your e-book or fill in demo requests.
3. Shorten your purchase cycle
Through content marketing, prospects would have learned a lot about your brand and its products and services.
By the time they are ready to buy, they won’t hesitate to choose your brand. You’ve developed a relationship with them through your content.
They trust your brand. Trust is an essential element when selling online and content marketing helps you earn trust.
4. Reduce costs
There are several ways content marketing reduces costs.
It means your business will spend less advertising on Google, Facebook, and others.
Prospects will also convert faster if they are really in need of your product. They’ve read your content. They’re ready to buy.
That means less time responding to emails from people asking questions about your products and services. By using content marketing, they’re already aware.
5. Increase revenue
With the right content your customers want to read, you can increase your average order value (AOV).
The right content will prevent your current customers from switching to competitors. This is because, through content, you can continue to deliver massive value to customers.
6. Nurture customer relationships
In addition to all of the above, content marketing also lets you maintain closer relationships with clients.
Even after customers had bought your product, you can get them to refer their friends and family to you.
A great content marketing campaign can help you achieve that.
Know your target audience
For your business or startup to be successful, you need to know your target audience.
Why is this so important?
Your customers will come from your target audience.
In other words, your target audience is your target market.
First, start with a broad target market.
For example, if you sell a help desk software, your target market will be medium and big sized businesses that run online. That’s a broad market.
After recognizing your broad market, you should narrow it down a little bit.
Competing in most broad markets is hard. Instead of offering help desk software to all companies on the web, you can narrow it down to online stores.
That means you only sell your help desk software to e-commerce sites. That sounds good. Now you have the power to compete because very few companies are targeting this narrow market specifically.
It means you won’t have to compete directly with giants like HelpScout and ZenDesk. Earth Class Mail only targets businesses that receive physical mails.
These two companies sell to the e-commerce stores too, but they don’t cater to them specifically like you’ll do.
Time to create a buyer persona that matches your target customers, who are e-commerce site owners.
You should have details like the below in your buyer persona:
- Age: 35
- Income: $70,000
- Located: Los Angeles, CA
- Goals: The freedom to travel the world
Information like this will help you create content that is relevant and valuable to your target audience.
Know your marketing message
Your marketing message is the vital point you’ll repeat in every content you publish.
Your key message is what grabs prospects’ attention, tells them how your product solves their problems and why they should trust you.
It explains to customers the reason why they should choose you over competitors. It speaks directly to customers in each piece of your content they read.
Unknown to many people, you should have a marketing message before launching your content marketing campaign.
Your key message may be your mission statement.
For example, Amazon’s mission statement says it wants “to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”
Anywhere Amazon gets to market its brand, it makes sure that customers get this key message.
Online shoppers go to Amazon because they know they can find what they want there. Amazon is becoming a place where you can buy anything.
What’s your company’s key message to customers?
For a local company that provides pest and wildlife services in Baltimore and Howard County like On The Fly Pest Control, it’s about providing safe and sustainable solutions to their clients.
Make sure that your target audience gets that key message in every content you publish.
Publish consistently
Your content marketing campaign will only achieve great success if you publish on a consistent basis.
After hitting the “Publish” button, you should be starting a new content immediately.
It’s worth noting that you shouldn’t just be publishing content for the sake of it. You should only create high-quality content.
When you publish high-quality content, readers will return to your site for more in the future. They are going to look forward to when new content is published.
In fact, businesses that publish consistently get a lot of traffic from Google.
According to research by HubSpot, Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that published between 0 – 4 monthly posts.
Keep Google happy with regular, high-quality content, and you’ll receive a lot of search visits.
If you’re in an industry where new developments happen daily, it gives you something new to write about.
For example, marketing, and technology are industries that get a lot of updates during the day.
Slower industries like manufacturing aren’t susceptible to much change.
Find ideas. Write about things your audience care about.
The more you post, the more traffic your company will receive. Also, make sure you’re posting high-quality content that deserves to rank in search engines.
Do internal linking
What’s an internal link?
It is a link that exists on a site, that’s linking to another page on the same site.
Internal links are used to keep visitors on your site. When you link internally to another page, it keeps visitors browsing your pages.
If the content on your internal links are interesting, visitors will continue to spend time on your site.
And that’s good for search rankings.
If people are spending more time on your site, it tells Google that it deserves to rank higher.
Keeping visitors on your site also help them become more familiar with your brand.
For example, when I visited the Groove blog. Alex Turnbull’s story about going from zero $100,000 in 2 years caught my attention.
As a result of stumbling on that page, I also read many other blog posts on the site. Since then, I’ve been a regular visitor to the site.
That’s what you get when you link internally.
Don’t just link to external pages on your site. Link internally too.
When a page on your site has a lot of links pointing to it, it gains authority. Those internal pages give it more ranking power.
Use visuals
Research shows that visuals attract more people online and help them retain information longer.
You should have someone in your content marketing team, who knows how to use Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator.
Creating and designing images can help your campaign to become more successful.
My favorite type of visuals are data-driven visuals.
Data-driven visuals receive 258% more trackbacks than blog posts.
Infographics are another type of visual content that receives social shares and backlinks. A well-designed and highly-researched infographic can go viral easily.
An infographic that is aesthetically pleasing with relevant data – that happens to be user-friendly – will undoubtedly help increase awareness of your brand.
Videos are another powerful visual content type you should add to your site. Almost every marketer is thinking about video.
Look at the top social media platforms, and you’ll see why.
Videos are extremely effective for converting customers.
You can add a video to your blog post.
You can share videos on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
You can also upload your video to the YouTube platform.
Target keywords
You’ll lose a lot of potential clients if you don’t optimize your content for search engines.
Keywords are an important part of search engines. The phrases web users input into the search box is called keywords.
By optimizing your content for the right keywords that are related to your business, products or services, you can drive lots of traffic to your site.
A content marketing campaign isn’t successful if it’s not getting worthwhile traffic from search.
Spread keywords across your content. Use keywords where they are relevant. Keywords will help Google understand your content better.
Don’t use any keywords in your content. Before you settle on a phrase, do keyword research.
Keyword research helps you gauge interest in a keyword and determine how tough it’ll be to rank high for it.
I recommend Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs as my top keyword research tools.
Use Google Keyword Planner to discover new keywords. Then use Ahrefs to know how easy or hard it’ll be to rank for that keyword.
For example, a Maryland attorney like Nicholas A. Parr can target keywords like Baltimore car accident and personal injury lawyer on his pages. That helps him rank on Google and other search engines.
Make content promotion a habit
Competition in content is fierce. Almost ever business is creating content.
How do you promote your content?
There are influencers and bloggers online you can build a relationship with.
When you have a good relationship with someone, and they are an influencer, you can ask them to link to your site.
Some will do. Some will not. It depends on how close the relationship is.
Maybe it’s a Slack group, social media chat, you can build a relationship with anyone in the world.
Just continue publishing and promoting your content.
Content promotion is an essential part of your content marketing campaign.
If you’re not promoting your content, no one will.
Conclusion
By doing all the above, you can prevent your content marketing campaign from failing.
Content marketing is the present and the future. Time to start leveraging it to build a powerful brand in your niche.
Note that you need a tool to help you collect emails on your website.
GrowthFunnel does that and connects you with your fans on social media.
It’s free to start using GrowthFunnel. Sign up today.
