What if your content doesn’t pan out as expected? Is there anything you can do about it?
You can bet on that. Several studies have shown that 9% of companies believe that their content is very effective in driving the marketing efforts. While 41% believe that the content helps them moderately, only 1% say content marketing is not at all effective!
It is evident that the content is a crucial factor in marketing and growing the business.
But what if all the efforts fail? Are there any strategies that an organization can follow to gain the traction again? Yes, surely there are some content marketing maneuvers you can try which we will discuss in this post.
Let us start by knowing some factors that may crash your content marketing strategy.
Why organization’s content fails
Following are some major pointers that lead to the failure of content marketing strategies for the companies.
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Lack of a refined strategy: Of all the successful content marketing organizations, 66 percent have a documented content strategy. While only 11 percent of the unsuccessful content marketers have any document strategy[Source]. A ‘no-document’ strategy is the lack of refined content strategy for both, B2B & B2C organizations.
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Lack of content promotion: Another reason for a failed content strategy is the weak content promotion. Many organization just create the content and do almost nothing afterward!
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Low-quality content: Seriously, this is where many players get killed! Content that is poor in quality, not engaging, or interactive will put all the organization’s efforts into waste. Lack of precise, visual, infographic and valuable content is a turn-off point for your online traffic.
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Lack of sufficient budget: Organizations that do not take content marketing seriously often cut the content budget to a minimum. This eventually proves to be a loss and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Organizations must focus on pooling a team of expensive writers, researchers, graphic designers, etc.
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Unrealistic expectations: Even though you created superb quality content, it still does not mean that it will boost itself and become viral magically! Consistency, both regarding quality and promotional efforts is a must here. For example, SEO Hacker blog used to get only about 500 visits per month initially. By just being consistent with their content strategy, and they now get more than 50,000 visitors per month.
The above pointers make it clear that the success in content marketing depends on several key factors. Quality, precision, consistency, and realistic goals can keep a company’s content from failing. Let us see what are the evasive steps to take when the content of an organization fails!
Five strategies to leverage when your content fails
#1. Use the power of visuals
Using compelling visuals relevant to your content is a powerful strategy to leverage your user base. Visuals are crisp in communication, attractive & engaging, and are capable of stirring the emotions of the viewer/audience.
In your content, make sure that you use graphics, infographics, flowcharts, and another form of visualizations to make the environment interactive for the reader.
Strategy
Your strategy should be to avoid an ‘all-text’ content approach. All-text content can be informative but fail to attract the reader’s attention.
On the other hand, infographics, stories, models, pictures, etc. communicate essential information to the customer with just a glance and boost target audience engagement.
Case study
Source: http://www.frac.tl
‘Perceptions of perfection’ was a campaign that got picked up by 600 top blog publishers to feature its story[Source]. The idea was powerful!
The campaign created a compelling story by sending a picture of a woman from different countries. The graphic designers from those countries were asked to morph the woman’s photo according to the beauty standards in their respective cultured.
The results were stunning. So much that the campaign got more than 900,000 shares on social media and 700,000 page views.
#2. Capitalize on trends
Social media is full of trends. From movie fever, politics & events to careers and global happenings. Capitalizing on such trends is a powerful idea. You can make your content relevant to any trend and propagate it through your channels.
For example, a women’s hygiene products brand can leverage the feminist wave to connect with their audience.
Strategy
The key here is to connect with your target audience. For that, know what are their profiles, interests, and preferences. If your brand can create content relevant to modern trends, you can surely leverage the factor because of the trending popularity itself.
Case Study
Source: https://sploid.gizmodo.com
Movoto, a real-estate company, exploited the power of trends. They created infographics related to Marvel comics characters.
Their infographic showed the origin state of each character, alongside the company’s main objective of real-estate information of that particular state. Movoto’s campaign got shared more than 9,000 times, and was featured in 365 blog stories!
#3. Improve your content
Let’s be honest; your content might not meet the standards that attract traffic to your site. You might be writing for a limited set of audience, or your content might not match the latest requirements of your industry.
It’s time to make the necessary changes and get your content to its highest potential. For example, content about the trending topics like cryptocurrency or social media trends is more eye-catching and will attract a broader audience.
Strategy
Aim at reacting to the latest market trends that are more exciting to the general audience. Make sure your brand shares the insights and information regarding the changes and upgrades in your field. You will act as a trusted source of information for your audience and hence generate credibility.
Case study
Bundoo is a website that publishes articles on pregnancy, pediatrics, and parenting. The marketing strategy they used was to provide extended content to reach the target audience.
Stephanie Winans, Chief Operating Officer, Bundoo, said their marketing was focussed more on content than “generic brand advertising.”
To generate more traffic the team incorporated a third party platform to the website. This integrated statistics to give dynamic data and visitor analytics. This led to a deep-insights about the bounce rates and helped understand the more preferred topics and articles.
#4. Invest in promotion
Organizations fail to evaluate the worth of quality content and end up limiting the budgets on content promotion and marketing.
Investing in quality writers and digital marketers will be your step towards generating quality content and getting it to the right audience.
Producing for an online audience will enhance your digital reach and create a long-term, low-cost advertisement chain. Invest in tools that promote your content and automate the functionalities.
This will enable you to manage a larger audience without compromising your existing resources.
Strategy
When things do not go according to the expectation, it is essential to modify your planning. Invest in promotions like acquiring talented content writer and a market team that can build a marketing strategy keeping in mind both the external and internal factors will always be beneficial.
Case Study
Old webpage
Source: https://www.weidert.com
New webpage
Source: https://www.weidert.com
Fisher Tank is a company equipped with solving tank challenges. It is the full leading service welded steel tank fabricators and constructions in the USA.
It has clients in the fuel industries, wastewater, pulp and paper and other industrial and municipal areas. Traditionally, for more than 60 years, the company has made its sales primarily through cold calling and referrals from existing clients.
So it took some moxie to launch a content marketing strategy online. The plan included sprucing up the website, integrating a blog and social sharing, along with offering some valuable content by free download.
This campaign increased web traffic by 119%, traffic from social media by 4800%, lead conversions by 3900%, quote requests by 500% and new qualified sales opportunities by $3.4 million, making the company maintain its position in the technological era too.
#5. Consistency is the key.
Train the subconscious mind of your target audience to develop a better branding for the company.
Being consistent with delivering your ideas time and again is essential. Consistently posting relevant content and attracting a right audience is a lengthy process which will prove to be fruitful in the long run.
Strategy
Show consistency in posting and revolve your content around the theme of your website. Collaborate with other sites with similar content to attract their audiences. Guest posting is a win-win situation where both parties are exposed to each other’s audience.
Engage your audience with the help of newsletters and send frequent updates and notifications you upload.
Case Study
CONVIRZA (formerly known as LOGMYCALLS) is the first call marketing optimization platform. Using clever ways, it uses customer conversations to produce remarkable business results. It practiced a “150 Blog Posts in 50 Days” mantra.
“With a company our size, the commitment has to be significant to produce three unique and useful blog posts a day,” says Inbound Marketing Manager, McKay Allen.
“After all, we also produce two original marketing webinars each week, monthly case studies, a variety of marketing White Papers, and some humorous and awesome marketing call tracking videos.” The result of this original and relevant content: A 400% increase in leads within 90 days.
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