Running a business is hard, and when sales dry up, we scramble for ways to fix it. We ask our fellow business owners what they’re doing, and we ask the internet what it thinks we should be doing to grow our business.
You’ll get a lot of different answers, but I can guarantee one of the tips you’ll get is to invest in content marketing.
How do I know that?
It’s not just because I’m one of the voices telling everyone they need to invest in content marketing.
It’s also because I’ve seen what can happen when content marketing is done right.
I’ve seen the leads appear, seemingly out of nowhere.
I’ve been on sales calls where prospects upsell themselves because of something they read on a blog post.
They didn’t need to be educated or convinced because they had been reading the wrong blog posts.
They were ready to buy because they had been reading the blog posts and emails designed to persuade them to buy.
Despite these successes, I still hear people saying content marketing doesn’t work. That tends to leave me scratching my head because I’ve seen it work.
So where’s the disconnect?
Here’s what I came up with as the top reasons people think content marketing doesn’t work:
Table of Contents
- Not Understanding SEO
- Too Much Promotional Content
- Not Giving It Enough Time
- Not Having a Clear Brand Voice
- Not Promoting Content
- Not Writing for the Ideal Audience
- Using the Wrong Call to Action (CTA)
- Not Having a Strategy
Not Understanding SEO
It boggles my mind when people say they’re investing in SEO, but not content marketing, because that’s not possible.
SEO is content based. Google (and now LLMs like ChatGPT) searches the internet for content that answers the questions its users are asking.
If the content on your website is thin or doesn’t address people’s concerns, Google won’t show it to their users.
If you haven’t published anything new on your website in months, Google will assume the content isn’t relevant, and won’t bother showing it to its users.
By contrast, the more content you have on your website, the more Google learns about you and comes to see you as an expert in your industry, which is needed for Google to direct its users to your website.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a technical side to SEO, and that cannot be ignored. But at its core, SEO has always been about people looking for content that answers the questions they’re asking. That means, if you want to rank for those searches, you need content that answers those questions. Really answers them.
Providing a surface-level non-answer and then leading quickly to a sales pitch will only get you people clicking away, never to be heard from again. And Google has gotten better at catching on to those and punishing the sites that implement them.
Too Much Promotional Content
We’ve all signed up for those free webinars and online “trainings” that promise to teach us how to do something, only to spend 5 minutes touching on the topic before diving into 50 minutes of trying to sell us on their product or service.
There are plenty of blog posts that do the same thing, and the reaction of readers and website visitors is the same: they feel like they were promised one thing and given another.
People who feel lied to tend not to come back to the people who lied to them.
The job of your marketing content (blog posts, videos, podcast, emails, social media posts, etc.) is not to sell. It is to educate your prospects on how your industry works, why they should care, what new developments are affecting your industry, etc.
Only by doing that consistently — week after week, month after month, year after year — can you earn people’s trust and become the go-to expert in your field.
To my earlier point about the role content plays in SEO, you also need to consistently create high-quality content that provides value to your target audience to earn Google’s trust so it will direct its users to your website.
Not Giving It Enough Time
One time I was babysitting a girl who was about 4 or 5 years old. Mom wasn’t scheduled to get home until after bed time, so I was responsible for giving her her bath and getting ready for bed.
I don’t remember how or why she first started drinking the soapy bathwater. What I remember is that, when I told her doing so would make her sick, her response was to drink more of it and immediately say, “See? I’m not sick!”
She was still a few years away from being able to understand how long it takes for the things we ingest to work its way through our digestive system and have their desired (or undesired) effects.
While we adults have a firmer grasp of how long it takes for certain things to take effect, most of us still underestimate how long it takes to see results from content marketing.
The general marketing recommendation is to give something 3-6 months before you measure you’re results and determine whether it’s working.
The problem with that timeline is that the 3-6-month mark is usually when the rubber starts to hit the road and you really gain traction from all the effort you’ve been putting in over those months.
That’s why I tend to recommend trying something for at 6 months, preferably a year, before you measure you’re results and give up.
Most of the most successful bloggers talk about how they published new blog posts every day for a year before they finally started seeing the results that helped catapult them to the fame and success they now enjoy.
Not Having a Clear Brand Voice
My favorite TV Show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you’ve ever watched it, you know dialogue is one of the show’s biggest strengths.
In one of the episode commentaries, a writer talks about how they initially assigned a line to one character, and after some rewriting, assigned the same line to a different character. When they turned in the script, it was immediately noted that the line is something the first character would have said. That’s the sign of excellent character development and dialogue.
The same should be true of your branding.
Every, single interaction with your brand needs to be the same.
That means everything from your social media posts to your emails to your videos to your website content all needs to use the same language.
If you start having one person write your website content, another person do your videos, and a third person handle your social media, your brand can very quickly sound like three different people.
That means your social media followers who find their way to your website won’t necessarily understand that it’s the same company because it doesn’t sound like the brand they’ve been following on social media.
That means you lose all the trust and goodwill you worked so hard to earn through all those social media posts and comments and engagement. It all goes out the window the second they encounter a different piece of your content that is also from your brand, but sounds like it’s from a completely different brand.
This is where the importance of brand voice guidelines come into play.
Any time you have a new person creating your content for you, you should give them your brand voice guidelines to ensure they create content that sounds like you, rather than like a different character altogether.
Not Promoting Content
I once told a client I don’t provide social media services, and he immediately asked, “Why don’t you think social media is a good idea?”
I don’t know what made him think not providing a service is the same as thinking that service doesn’t have value. There are more services I can count that I don’t provide that have value.
While social media is, technically, part of content marketing, it’s a completely different ballgame from blogs and website copy. Rather than trying to become a Jane-of-All-Trades, I’d rather stay in my line and get really good and website copy and SEO.
If you need someone to handle your social media for you, I have several people I can recommend, and some I’ve even teamed up with on projects.
A big reason content marketing doesn’t work is that people publish it and expect people to magically find their way to it, but it doesn’t work like that.
Even when you’re doing everything right to get your content to rank in relevant searches, it still takes a while for the algorithms to scan your content and match it with the appropriate searches.
And even then, one of the best ways to make the algorithms sit up and take notice is to start driving traffic to your new content. When the algorithms see a particular piece of content is already getting traffic, that will send a signal that there’s value in that content, and they’ll respond by boosting that content in the search rankings.
That means you need to promote your content as soon as you publish it.
Share it on social media.
Link to it in your newsletter.
Share it on social media.
Create a companion video.
Share it on social media. Social media content has a very short lifespan, so don’t be afraid to say the same thing over and over on social media to get it in front of as many people as possible.
In addition to promoting your new blog post, sharing it everywhere has the benefit of giving you more content that’s easy to create. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel every time to go to create a piece of content, just reuse what you already have.
Not only does that make it easier to create content for all the platforms without taking up all your time, it also ensures you make the most of your content.
People won’t necessarily make their way to your blog unprompted, but if they get your newsletter and see the link to a blog article that looks interesting, they’ll click through.
Someone who doesn’t know to look for your blog might stumble across your social media post and find their way to your blog that way.
So, while it can be boring to say the same thing over and over, the important thing is to remember that the next time you say it, you’re not saying it to the same people you said it to the last time you said it. You have to repeat yourself multiple times to grow your audience and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
Not Writing for the Ideal Audience
I’ve read a lot of great blog posts.
I’ve read a lot of bad blog posts.
And I’ve read a lot of mediocre blog posts, most of which have good intentions, but they miss one key ingredient: writing with the ideal audience in mind.
They write about whatever interests them, without taking into consideration the questions their audience wants answered.
They use a lot of industry jargon their audience doesn’t understand. I get it, we use this jargon day in and day out, and it can be easy to forget that not everyone is as familiar as we are with these concepts.
Take a minute to review every piece of content you create from the perspective of your audience. Ask yourself if they care about the topic. Then ask yourself if there’s any jargon or industry-specific terms that might go over the head of your ideal audience.
Using the Wrong Call to Action (CTA)
When considering the topics that interest your audience and the language that resonates with them, you also need to consider where they are in the buyer journey when they encounter each piece of content.
If you do your SEO and content promotion right, your blog posts will get some people in the early stages of the buyer journey, but you’ll also probably get some repeat visitors who are familiar with you and the services you provide, and are checking back in to see what’s new.
That can make it tricky to determine where most people are in the buyer journey when they encounter your blog posts. But unless it’s a promotional blog post (you are allowed those once in a while, as long as they make up the minority of your posts), most people coming to your blog are going to be in the early stages of the buyer journey.
That means they’re unlikely to be ready for a “free consultation,” which we all know is code for “sales call.” That’s like proposing marriage on the first date.
Instead, invite them on a second date. Ask them to subscribe to your newsletter, sign up for your webinar, or follow you on social media.
Those are low-level asks that people who are interested in your content are likely to respond well to.
It also gives you an opportunity to continue to put content in front of them and stay top of mind while convincing them of the value you provide. That way, when they are ready to buy, not only will they think of you first, they’ll already trust you’re the go-to company for the service they need.
Not Having a Strategy
As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts involved when it comes to creating effective content for your business.
It can be hard enough to get one or two of these pieces right, much less all of them.
But taking into consideration your brand, your ideal client, the problem you solve for them, and how to convince them you’re the one they need, is where the magic happens.
That’s when you need a content marketing strategist to take a step back, look at the puzzle as a whole, then start filling in the missing pieces.
If that sounds like something you could use, let’s chat.
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