Is your content marketing strategy doing the most it can for your organization?
Make sure you’re getting the best results possible and the highest ROI by ensuring you aren’t struggling with one of these five common roadblocks:
- Lacking a documented content strategy
- Ignoring SEO
- Too much focus on keywords
- Not repurposing content
- Forgetting to test
# 1 You Lack a Documented Content Strategy
Let’s start with the most obvious sign you might need content marketing help. It seems nearly impossible for an organization to not have a content marketing strategy in place in 2021…but only 84% of surveyed organizations do, according to Semrush.
Even more discouraging? Only 11% of organizations consider their content marketing strategy to be an excellent one.
Having a content strategy in place means more than churning out and publishing regular content. A sound content strategy includes all things content: planning, development, and management. Without this, your content will likely fall flat, fail to reach your intended audience, and lack to deliver ay true value.
Having an editorial calendar is usually a sound place to start with creating a content strategy. An editorial calendar can help organizations:
- planning your content out a few months in advance
- define themes and focuses
- assign content topics to subject matter experts for review
- create a consistent schedule
Be ready to rework a content marketing strategy as needed. The COVID-19 pandemic caused a significant 94% of content marketers to change their content marketing strategy, according to the Content Marketing Institute.
# 2 You’re Not Prioritizing SEO
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial to get the most out of your content marketing efforts.
If your content marketing efforts neglect taking SEO into account, you could be wasting valuable time and money creating content that isn’t reaching your target audience. Or, for that matter, reaching any audience at all!
# 3 You Started With Keywords
While keywords play a huge role in making your content marketing successful, keywords are not the starting place for creating great content or an overall content strategy. Instead, you want to focus on delivering valuable information to your audience. How do you do this?
First and foremost, think about your audience. You don’t want to reach your potential customers through a search engine and disappoint them. Keyword stuffing doesn’t cut it anymore; your content needs to provide value to your audience and connect with them.
Whether it’s offering a solution or delivering educational value, always ensure your content will help your targeted audience.
Remember: It’s even worse to disappoint your audience than not reach them in the first place!
# 4 You’re Not Repurposing
No matter how large and effective your marketing team may be, the simple truth is that creating new content takes a good ol’ chunk of time.
If you aren’t repurposing your content into new formats, you’re wasting a huge opportunity to extract the most value out of your content marketing efforts and increase your ROI.
The first step to repurposing content successfully is to monitor the analytics of your content. Once you’ve narrowed down your most successful pieces of content, it’s time to think of new ways to share this valuable information with your audience.
An effective blog post might be worth expanding into an ebook, or work well as a fun infographic or video. Whether you try new mediums or new channels, get creative in your content repurposing. Experiment see what resonates most with your audience.
# 5 You Aren’t Testing
Finally, one more major sign you might need content marketing help? If you lack the time or energy to test your content.
What do we mean by testing? Everything from email subject lines to call-to-action buttons can impact your target audience’s level of engagement.
The only way to optimize content is to test everything and make improvements accordingly.
For instance, let’s consider a simple case study. You may wonder what’s the best day of the week to send a marketing email?
According to CoSchedule, it’s Tuesday. This is based on data from 14 different studies, with sample size varying from billions of emails to more than 20 million emails.
With those kinds of numbers, you could just assume Tuesday is the best way to go…but this may not be true for your industry or intended audience. In fact, CoSchedule recommends setting up test emails for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, then measuring the results and going from there.
You could start with A/B testing for emails and experiment with different times, days, or even weeks to get a better understanding of your audience and when your content sings the most. Once you begin comparing tests and metrics, you can truly begin to boost your ROI and make the most of your content marketing efforts.
if you aren’t testing, you’re missing out on interesting insights that will help you better understand your content marketing’s ROI. And that’s just poor marketing!