If you have ever read my blog before, you’ll know I am a big proponent of content marketing and believe it can transform the fortunes of flagging companies so long as it is done correctly. According to a HubSpot FREE report, companies with 51-100 pages of content on their websites generate almost 50% more traffic than sites with 50 pages or less. Additionally, blogging 15 times a month generates 400% more traffic than if you don’t blog at all (note to self, write more posts!).
The aforementioned report features data from 7,000 companies so it is a fairly strong indicator of the importance of content marketing. Below, we look at 4 signs you need a content marketing strategy.
1 – Lack of Consistency
This is of course the bane of all content marketing drives. It is common for businesses to create huge swathes of content initially but they soon find ideas hard to come by. Eventually, the other aspects of the business take over and content marketing is shoved into a dark corner. By implementing a content strategy, you’ll quickly ensure it becomes a focus; this is even more likely to be the case if you hire a writer. After all, we tend to be more careful about things when money is involved.
With regular content you’ll force the search engine spiders to crawl your site more frequently thus improving your SEO ranking. As an added bonus, more content provides more opportunities to show your expertise and mark you out as an expert in your niche which is always nice.
2 – No Focus on Your Target Audience
Just as every blog post should have one core idea with everything else branching out from it, your content marketing strategy must have a similar focus. Who are you really writing for? There is no point attempting to write for a generic audience because you’ll end up with a wishy-washy stream of content that commits to nothing. If you want content marketing success, discover your target market and write for them. If you want to be vague, become a politician and start learning ‘doublespeak’.
3 – Your Content is Confusing
I alluded to this point above; each blog post must have a singular message. For example, this post is all about reasons why you need a content marketing strategy; you’ll notice I am not interspersing condemnation of Margaret Thatcher’s treatment of the working class within this blog post (despite the link)!
Though that would be preposterous, there are plenty of blogs which completely go off the point. They begin with a message about changing your content strategy and end up talking about world peace or something. Each post needs to provide accurate information and perhaps solve a reader’s problem. Everything else is just waffle.
4 – Lack of Promotion
As I have learned the hard way, no promotion means no one knows or cares about what you do. Allow me to go off on a tangent and completely ignore rule #3 above: There are thousands of boy and girl bands who all have the same look and sound. There is no discernible difference in talent yet certain bands fare better than others.
For example, One Direction is a pretty bog standard boy band yet they are enjoying phenomenal success. Why? Because they have a brilliant marketing team behind them so everyone thinks this average group is amazing when all their success really means is that they’re the beneficiaries of great marketing.
You need to focus more on promoting your content; only then will people actually know who you really are. This means a greater presence on social media sites and a greater commitment to getting your name out there.
Hopefully, the above has given you some useful information on content marketing and it can prevent your company from remaining in the shadows.
photo credit: seanrnicholson via photopin cc
photo credit: (Mick Baker)rooster via photopin cc