As a B2B marketer, it’s probably been drilled into you by now that you need to use content marketing in your strategies. With 93% of B2B’ers creating it, the content pool is a crowded place, which has served to reinforce the need for marketers to create fantastic content and produce original ideas so they are guaranteed to win with it.
Do you think your content marketing is sinking or swimming? Take a look at these five signs your content marketing is failing, and learn how to turn it around.
1. No ideas
If you’re writing content for the sake of joining in with the content buzz, you’re wasting your time. Churning out pieces because you feel you have to will mean it will have little relevancy to most of your audience, it will feel forced and it probably won’t be valuable or engaging.
Before you start to create your content, plan a strategy, and think of who you are writing for, as well as their needs and personas. Most of the time you will probably be targeting potential customers or clients, so think about a challenge or problem they might face and how they can fix it. This way they will feel like they have benefited from reading your content, and in turn make your business seem more trustworthy.
2. No clicks
So you’re providing great content, but now you’re not seeing any interactions or click-through. Sadly it’s not as easy as that in an ever saturated digital world. Even if you are offering really good content you can’t rely on SEO for it just to be found amongst the vast sea of what is already available on the internet.
After you have worked out who your audience is, make sure your content ends up in front of them with content syndication. Once your content is promoted to the right audience and gaining additional exposure, you can use lead capture forms with qualification criteria to ensure you are receiving valuable information back.
3. No leads
Are you seeing a high click-through rate on your content but you’re still not getting any leads? It could be that your content is great but your landing page is turning your readers away. Think about what you are asking them, and if it were you, would you be likely to answer them? Are you asking too many questions? Are they too personal? Maybe they are just too hard. While someone might be willing to tell you their email address, they might be a lot less likely to tell you if they will buy a product in the next 3 months.
Make sure your landing page doesn’t scare potential business away or annoy them. Alternatively, use a business that guarantees leads; by using a cost-per-lead lead generation business you can make sure your content ends up in front of the right people, and have the assurance of receiving with their full contact details.
4. No automation
B2B buyers perform an average of 12 searches before engaging with a brand’s site when making a purchase. Therefore your content marketing strategy is going to run into some problems if you start chasing for money after the initial download.
Most marketers will feed the leads they receive into a marketing automation programme, which will nurture your leads for you, drip feeding them more content until they are reading to buy. This is often done by using lead scoring, and when your lead scores high enough through showing interest in content, they will be passed over to sales to hopefully complete the buying process.
5. No ROI
After all this hard work, it’s now out of your hands, and the leads are passed over to the sales team. But that doesn’t mean it’s over for the marketer, as when it comes back to ROI, especially if it fails to deliver this will fall back on them.
Seeing a bad ROI doesn’t necessarily mean that the content marketing campaign went badly, it could mean that sadly the sales follow up didn’t quite hit the mark. Ensure your sales and marketing team are aligned for your strategy, and ensure the sales team have received great training about the product or content they are selling, in order to avoid falling at the last hurdle.
There are many reasons as to why your content marketing might not be delivering the results you think it should, but these five tend to be the main culprits that cause content marketers despair. If you can identify with any of these points it might be time to take a step back and re-evaluate your strategy to make sure you’re getting the most out of your content.
