IN THIS ISSUE:
• Content Marketing Mistakes That Are Killing Your Strategy
• How To Fix Your Content Marketing

It’s no secret that content marketing has exploded over the last few years. Everywhere you look there’s content, content and more content. For a while, marketers were extremely excited that so many businesses were on board with such an effective digital marketing tactic. But as content is churned out at an increasing rate, it’s become painfully obvious that the Internet is now saturated with too much content.

You’re thinking, “If content is so great, how could there ever be too much of it?” The problem is the wide range of quality in the mass amounts of content being produced - and the unfortunate fact that most of it just isn’t very good. There’s a huge misconception about content marketing that seems to be the root cause of a lot of struggling content strategies: content doesn’t work the way most people think it does.

As the demand for content continues to rise, businesses and even marketers are losing sight of the actual function of content marketing. When a company publishes a blog post and people read, like and share it, the blog should be considered a success. However, many businesses believe that since their piece of content did well, anybody who reads it will immediately make a purchase. That’s not how content works.

Be Passionate About Your Customers
What all of this means is that you need to start differentiating your content and help it rise to the top of the content food chain. There’s no reason to stop creating content, but you also can’t ignore the fact that it’s becoming harder to get content in front of enough people for it to be effective. One of the easiest ways you can start to re-think your content strategy is by getting to know your customers. Instead of putting your company or even your customers’ potential interest in your products first, just become passionate about your customers and who they are. Once you’re familiar with your customers’ likes, dislikes, occupations, personality types and what they spend their money on, you can put yourself in their shoes and essentially become a customer. What better way to find out what kind of content they really want to read?

Your content marketing strategy might be struggling, but the good news is there are some easy fixes. By implementing just a few of these simple changes, you’ll likely be doing much more than your competition:
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• Create personas: drawing up customer personas for all the various types of people who are interested in your products and services can make a significant difference in your marketing efforts. Creating personas will help you get more in tune with your customers’ needs and therefore give you the insight to create better content.
  
• Cater content: once you have an understanding of who your customers are, you can start to think about how each one of your personas moves along the buying cycle. Your personas are likely to move at varying speeds, which means they are asking different questions that require different answers. The more you can break down and specifically target your content, the better.
  
• Plan and schedule: as with most things, having a plan makes things more efficient. You might not follow the plan exactly, but at least if you map out and schedule your content, you can hold your team accountable for deadlines. If you leave content for “when you have time” it’ll never get the attention it needs to achieve success.

This has only been a brief outline as to why you should re-assess your content marketing strategy. Content marketing needs time and complete commitment in order to be effective. For further information and guidance on how to redesign your content marketing strategy, get in touch with a local WSI Consultant today!
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