4 Reasons Your Online Content Marketing Strategy Isn’t Working

Posted: Oct 07, 2012
Author: WordJack Media

Online content marketing can have a huge ROI, but unfortunately, it’s not as simple as putting up a blog or a website and then sitting back and watching the dough roll in. Sometimes your online content marketing strategy just isn’t cutting it, and you’re not sure why. But don’t give up yet! Here are four possible (and very fixable) reasons:

1. You’re focusing too much on self-promotion. Let’s be blunt: No one cares about your company or how amazing your products are. They only care about what you can do for them. If they think you are just trying to market a product to them, they are going to delete that email, click the “back” button on their web browser, and the idea of sharing that content with their friends on Facebook is never going to enter their mind. However, if you can show your potential customers how their lives will be better if they do business with you, you’re really onto something.

2. You haven’t fully developed your company’s voice (or you’re using the wrong one). Your company’s voice is just as important as its logo. The “voice” of your company is what your customers hear when they read your content—Does it sound like it’s coming from a recent college grad, full of current pop-culture references and jokes? Or does it sound more like an experienced CEO, with lots of authority and time-tested industry knowledge? After you figure out who your target audience is, develop a voice for your online content marketing that resonates with that specific group of people.

3. People aren’t seeing your content. Creating awesome online content is only half the battle—you’ve also got to put some elbow grease in to making sure people see it. For starters, build a fan base on social media networks and distribute your content through that channel. If your content is good enough, your fans will share it with their friends and their friends will share it with their friends, and so on and so forth. You can also distribute content through a website like Outbrain, which allows you to specify the target audience for your message. How’s that for cost-effective online marketing?

4. Your content isn’t being used to its full potential. If you can become a triple threat online marketer, with an arsenal of amazing text, photos, AND videos, you’re all set to spread your online marketing content throughout several different platforms and capitalize on each of them. Text works best for Twitter and Facebook (questions are great for getting discussion going too!), pictures are king on Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram, and videos are the only option on YouTube. Nail all three, and you’ll be sitting on top in no time.

Online content marketing may sound daunting, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. We’ve heard businesses talk about all sorts of difficulties. What advice would you give a business that could make things easier?