What Businesses Are Wrong About Content Marketing in 2023 [Expert Tips]

The promise of inbound marketing is an allure that attracts businesses of all types, but few understand the effort it takes to be successful. After a few blog posts, they flare up and grumble “We tried content marketing, but it didn’t really work for us.” I hear this all the time from potential clients.

And I get it. Business owners are wary of making an investment that may not pay off, so they tend to be on the alert and ready to pull the plug at the first sign of wasted money.

honestly, they probably Are Wasting money There is an epidemic of half-hearted content marketing out there that is discrediting the entire inbound philosophy.

So when I hear potential clients say they tried content marketing but didn’t see results, this is how I react.

Why your content marketing efforts may be falling short

Content marketing is not a new thing. The idea has been around for decades. At this point, no business professional is unfamiliar with a blog, search engine traffic, or social media.

The problem, it seems to me, is that too many people have misunderstood the true purpose of content marketing – and so they’ve missed the mark on their previous efforts.

Visit most companies’ blogs and you’ll find fluffy, self-serving material: pictures from their cleanup day at the local park, press release-style articles about promotions and employee-of-the-month winners.

Or, it’s full of content that sounds derivative and similar to a thousand other articles on the internet.

It’s no surprise to me that this type of content has failed to bring in customers.

Remarkable Effort, Remarkable Result

As with most things in life, your results match your efforts. As the saying goes, “you get out of it what you put into it.” same thing here.

When companies tell me about their forays into content marketing in the past, I’m not surprised that it didn’t work out for them.

“We Tried Content Marketing…”

If you’re one of those businesses that “tried” content marketing only to see sub-par results – I’ll bet you get out what you put into it.

This happens for some very common reasons, and I have seen dozens of companies fail because of these same few mistakes.

1. There was no clear owner of your content marketing. If content marketing is something that gets sidetracked with other responsibilities, it’s going to fall by the wayside. You can’t ask someone who already has a full time job to build and implement a product Complete Content Marketing Strategy, This is a full time job in itself. Heck, it may be more than a full time job.

2. You played it safe. To me, content marketing is all about educating your customer. It’s about building trust and being transparent so that your potential buyers can access the information they need to become customers. This means you need to address thorny topics. This means you have to present sincerity rather than a sales pitch. When we tell businesses they need Tell your buyers specific drawbacks and drawbacks Regarding their products, some blink and decide to play it safe, downplaying the whole effort.

3. You didn’t have a frame. If you don’t have a plan, you won’t get very far. A framework gives you structure and benchmarks. Without it, you have guesswork and inconsistency – which can quickly lead to frustration.

4. You hired a sub-par agency to produce your materials for you. The reason why most content marketing initiatives I have seen fail is because businesses hire poorly prepared agencies or freelancers to do it for them. It sounds like a great idea at first, but the consequences are almost always overwhelming. These outsiders sometimes produce the same bland, derivative content that sounds like everyone else in your industry – but that doesn’t sound like you. The content just doesn’t resonate with buyers, and business leaders scratch their heads and wonder how they paid so much and got so little.

“… but it didn’t work for us.”

There’s also something to unpack here. What do you mean it didn’t work for you? How do you plan to measure success?

To evaluate any marketing initiative, it needs to be measured, and those measurements need context to make sense.

that’s why i find myself Helping Our Clients Learn What They Didn’t Know About Inbound Marketing,

Mistakes Business Leaders Make in Their Content Marketing Strategies

Mistake One: Focusing on the Wrong Metrics

The inbound funnel is a compelling idea: If you get enough traffic to your site, a percentage of that traffic will convert to leads, and a percentage of those leads will convert to sales.

So people assume that more traffic will equal more sales.

not necessarily. While organic traffic is important, it can also be a vanity metric that distracts you from your most important goals.

Imagine this:

• Article A gets 10,000 views and 10 subscribers per month.
• Article B gets 2,000 views per month and 20 subscribers.
• Article C gets 500 views per month and 50 subscribers.

Too often, companies chase paragraph A, putting their effort into high-traffic content that doesn’t convert visitors into customers.

Which leads us to our second mistake.

Mistake Two: Not Involved in the Sale

The inside view isn’t just a marketing gimmick. In fact, if you limit it to just marketing, you dilute your results. Inbound is as much about sales as it is about marketing.

You see, you’re more likely to produce a library of article A-type content if you don’t involve your sales team in your content marketing. Marketers love to boast about reach, and what’s more encouraging than thousands of site visitors?

The sales team will bring your marketing team back down to earth. Because your sales reps hear from real customers every day, they know what your prospects are really asking. They know why Article C is a better investment of your team’s time.

content marketing promise

Look, I understand that companies get started in content marketing for many reasons. But in most cases, the goal is to increase revenue. Brand recognition is great, but for most of the businesses I work with, it only matters if it converts to sales at the other end of the funnel.

When I hear from business leaders that content marketing didn’t work for them, it’s often due to the fact that they were chasing metrics of brand recognition (organic traffic, social media engagement, etc.) Were acting haphazardly, putting in a shoddy agency or themselves putting in disproportionate effort.

It is no surprise that the results did not materialize.

To do content marketing right, we need to reintroduce ourselves with real objectives that matterTrain our employees to excel—and be ready for a long-term commitment.

Anything less will give sub-par results.