What is the first thing you think of when you hear the words; content marketing strategy?

Do alarm bells go off in your head like you’re trying to be sold a product under the guise of a simple read? Or does your mind begin to wonder why your content even needs a marketing strategy; after all, isn’t content marketing simply about publishing content?

If your thoughts fall within the first category, you are likely to be a consumer who has had too many run-ins with pitch sales disguised as blog articles. If your thoughts fall into the second, you are likely a new business owner or a business owner with a low online presence. Whether you are a consumer or an eCommerce business owner, content marketing is something you will ultimately come across or have to incorporate to reach a wider audience.

What is Content Marketing

Content marketing is just as it sounds. Businesses are simply marketing their content, but the key to a good content marketing strategy is to pitch your products without consumers knowing it’s a sales pitch. Content marketing is a form of marketing that involves producing and publishing content for a specific audience. 

For every blog post you have stumbled upon or intentionally sought out, a form of content marketing strategy is at work. For example, if a blog post makes you want to know more about a brand or service without being blatant with it, then the process worked. You may wonder, “if content marketing is about delivering a sales pitch, why isn’t yours working?” This leads us to the top reasons why your content marketing strategy is failing.

Why does content marketing fail?

We can narrow down why most content marketing plans do not bring in the leads to the following reason;

Salesman antics: we have all gotten a couple of sales calls or had a salesman show up at our door refusing to leave until we commit to something. Do you remember that feeling of exasperation you had? Yeah…, that’s the last way you want readers to feel. A good content marketing strategy should not make readers and potential consumers feel like products and services are being shoved down their throats. The content in your content marketing strategy should make readers interested enough to know more about the brand, but that fails if they don’t get past the first paragraph. This issue can be solved by fine-tuning your approach to content and cultivating the habit of subtlety. Your content should spread to your readers easily like butter on fresh toast.

Scattered Content: There is a reason why marketing strategists encourage choosing a niche for your eCommerce brand. A niche allows you to tailor your audience and maximize your marketing effort. Once a consumer visits your blog, they should get a read of what your brand is about, even if it is not the full picture. The content posted on any social media platform should have a streamlined approach. Putting an effective content marketing strategy to work on scattered content is hard. With such content, the results would still be unfruitful no matter the effort in place.

Failure to perform SEO: SEO goes hand in hand with content marketing. A little keyword research can go a long way to getting your content on Google’s search results first page. eCommerce business owners sometimes get turned off by the word “SEO.” SEO comes across as technical and arduous to achieve when in reality, you need to know how it works. Rightly placing top keywords, meta-descriptions, and title tags in a blog post goes a long way in increasing site traffic.

Lack of valuable content: all content is not good content. Have you ever read an article that ended up providing no value? As much as the internet gives us easy access to information, it contains information we do not need. There are different types of content marketing, and your ability to distinguish which works best for your brand can be a significant differentiator. Content that tries too hard to advertise its products and services would fail over one that attempts to provide valuable information to its readers. If consumers find answers in your content, they will ultimately stick around and buy into the service.

Lack of goals: eCommerce based or not, a business aiming for success should have goals. What are you trying to achieve with your content marketing strategy? Are you trying to increase brand awareness? Are you trying to address consumer pain points? Are you trying to increase revenue? Asides from defining these goals, they need to be shared and internalized with your in-house content team or content marketing agency. Any content marketing strategy your business employs should be geared towards measurable goals. Without goals, you can’t clearly determine where your brand is headed.

Not measuring analytics: Above, we mentioned a lack of goals, and once business goals are established, the analytics of the content marketing strategy should be measurable. Measuring analytics is one of the ways eCommerce brands can gauge the results of their content marketing. With content marketing, creating nonstop content is only acceptable if you can see how the content is fairing. Good content should have engagements, convert leads, and bring a strong return on investment (ROI).

Lack of Consistency: the internet is filled with more content than the entire human population can consume. Every minute over 500+ hours of video content is released on YouTube alone. Once we include other internet-based platforms, you quickly realize that it becomes hard to keep consumers interested. For this reason, the lack of consistency in publishing content can result in a drop in website traffic since it is easy for consumers to find content elsewhere.

Content marketing in 2022 can be easy and fun.

Content marketing strategies do not have to be difficult, tedious, or overly technical. It is easier to achieve brand business goals once you develop a routine that works for your brand and are consistent with that routine. Remember that good content is the bait, but a great content marketing strategy is the hook, line, and sinker.

Kaku is a content marketing agency that delivers converting content and marketing strategies to SaaS and other eCommerce brands.