Why Content Marketing isn't Getting the Results it Should - Common Mistakes Companies are Making

Published: Aug. 29, 2019, 8 p.m.

Introduction of guest


Further Reading:


Interview

What types of content, the breakpoint between in-house and outsource, 

MC’s Top 5 are…

  1. No entertainment value or story (speaks to the quality issue)
  2. Promotion means more PR than sharing
  3. No partnerships
  4. You should probably guest post half the time
  5. Diversity of Content to Expand Channels


My list of the five most common content marketing mistakes I see and tactical advice for how to fix them:

  1. Ignoring Target Audience - The writer doesn’t stop to consider: “Who am I writing this for?”, “Why will my target audience want to read it?” and “What value am I delivering to them?”
    1. Fix: Write down the persona(s) you are writing it for and why they would want to read it before you write. 
  2. Focusing on Features - we’ve all done this. The more marketers share the revenue objective with sales, the more they feel pressure to sell in early stage marketing content.
    1. Fix: Think about your content relative to stages in your marketing and sales pipeline. Start simple by creating just three categories:
      1. Engaging & Generating Demand: Thought leadership content that is value oriented - no features.
      2. Develop Opportunities: Content that describes the solution to a problem they are having - benefits, but still little to no features.
      3. Moving Opps Through Sales Cycle: Content that explains the exact features that solve their problems.
  3. Rushing the Landing Page - So typical to find rushed LPs. They are commonly 1) a copy/paste of the intro of the asset, 2) written by someone who hasn’t read the asset, or 3) simply doesn’t tell the target audience the value they will get from reading/viewing the asset. 
    1. Fix: The goal is to have landing pages that specifically call out the key value for the target audience so they make the time to fill out a form and actually absorb the asset. There are two ways to approach this problem. 
      1. Have the author of the paper write the landing page. 
      2. Have the landing page writer read the asset cover to cover. 
  4. Generic Promotion - Emails and social media are critical pieces of the content marketing engine that help draw your target audience to your content and into your pipeline. Unfortunately, many companies have these functions working in virtual isolation from content creators and the end result is generic promotion.
    1. Fix: There are two approaches for resolving this issue. 
      1. Have the author take their message all the way downstream by also creating email copy and social posts. CoSchedule.
      2. Require your authors to create value prop statements as part of the draft header. When they are listing out the value to the target au