Why does most Content Marketing miss the mark and not be used? | Strategies to make Content Marketing easier and more effective

Content is often designed based on the imperative of the publishing company. That means it is skewed to position a particular product or service offer rather than deliver real value to the recipient.

That’s because in many companies, marketing is still seen as a support service to the sales function. Marketing is all too often viewed in lead generation terms when brand and reputation building, creating and nurturing communities and supporting an expert position are harder to quantify.

So, in a rush to drive interest, companies build landing pages, write blog posts and create guides that they think will position their products and services in a helpful way INSTEAD OF addressing the problems and challenges target customers are really facing.

If you’re guessing what is important to customers instead of researching it, or focusing on your own sales objectives, your content will continue to flounder.

This is largely an internal factor – where sales professionals don’t use the marketing assets provided because they don’t see the value in them.

This may be as a result of the marketing team creating assets in a vacuum rather than harnessing the “voice of the customer” that sales teams are in position to provide.

Any credible content needs to move target customers closer to a sale. So blog articles need to talk about problems and challenges and offer solutions, ensuring what you offer is in the mix.

Consider turning your brochures into buyers guides that do more than profile product options and talk more about the problems you address, why you offer what you offer and the transformation you deliver. It’s way more interesting.

Then encourage sales teams on how to effectively use this content in their conversations – whether its first touch or final touch to secure the order.

It’s getting increasingly harder to get people to click links to websites so look at removing some of the gates you’ve placed on your content. And even if you keep them in place, make sure you are seeding more content “up front” to whet their appetite.

Declining clickthrough is certainly a factor considering social media and email marketing. Think of your own social use. You watch and read content natively in the place you came for it. You’re scrolling within a social media feed and don’t want to be taken away from it.

Professionals in many fields are building huge followings by posting natively to Linkedin, Facebook and Instagram rather than writing blogs and trying to get people to read them*.

If you are creating content and seeking to signpost people to it, you need to offer more of it upfront for free. Witness the podcast and webinar outtakes and teasers to get people to register and subscribe, outtakes of articles seeding on social media and free chapters from ebooks and guides.

(*The best approach is of course to combine the two as the blog writing still offers evergreen search engine optimisation and builds brand and expertise long term).

Taking the native argument further, content needs to be easily accessible and as engaging as possible.

A good proportion of social and web use now comes through mobile devices – with much smaller screens than tablets and laptop screens – so the native aspects of delivering content are important too.

And people simply don’t want to click away to watch or read something.

For example, there are great opportunities to build both corporate brands and personal brands on LinkedIn and a number of ways to share valuable information to target customers – posting from individual profiles and pages, publishing articles, running groups, issuing a newsletter to followers and using the LinkedIn Live functionality (third party software required).

Twitter is still a place to go for immediate real-time updates (whereas LinkedIn has a slower roll out algorithm) and remains the go-to platform for events, conferences and exhibitions. Twitter’s technology has evolved to include Twitter Lists where you build segmented follower lists and Twitter Spaces where, in the Clubhouse style, live audio pop up events can be staged or attended (you could involve your Twitter lists!)

Instagram offers Feed posts, Story posts, Reels and IGTV for longer video and a plethora of in-app technologies to create content that can be re-used elsewhere.