What to Do if Your Content Efforts Aren’t Working

Creating content requires a significant investment of time, energy, and money. So what do you do if you feel like you’re not getting a return on that investment? Should you continue pouring effort into your blog or social media if it’s not making a difference for your business?

There are some common reasons why your content marketing may not be working for you. Before swearing it off forever, here are some steps you can take to determine why your content marketing isn’t working — and how to get it back on track. 

Get specific about what you want content marketing to do for you

Before you can determine if your content marketing efforts are working or not, you need to know what your primary goal is. What is it that you’re trying to get out of content marketing in the first place? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you won’t know what data to track, and you won’t know whether or not your content marketing is a success.

You might already be tracking different metrics. For example, you may be monitoring traffic to your website, newsletter sign-ups, clicks, and more. When you have a clear goal for your content marketing, one or two of these metrics will reveal themselves to be the most important. These metrics are known as key performance indicators, or KPIs. They are data points that signify whether or not you’re meeting your goal.

Here’s an example. Let’s say your goal is to get more client hires from your content marketing. In this case, your KPI would be the number of hires you get per week. While you can still get valuable insights from metrics like follower count, likes, clicks, site visitors, or impressions, these won’t ultimately be the metrics that will tell you if you’re meeting your goal. Even if you’re seeing a ton of traffic to your website, if you’re not seeing the number of hires (your KPI) budge, your content strategy won’t be a success. 

Having a goal makes it clear what your KPIs are. And your KPIs make it clear whether or not your marketing strategy works. If your marketing efforts aren’t moving the needle on your KPIs, you know you need to change up your strategy.

Make sure you’re actually promoting your content

It’s not enough just to post something on your blog and then hope people find it. You need to market your content, too.

Promoting your content helps people find it — and there are dozens of ways to do this. Take, for example, a blog post you just added to your website. To promote it, you could:

• Break up the post into several different long-form text posts for LinkedIn or Facebook

• Pull quotes from the piece and turn them into graphics for Instagram

• Read a snippet from the post on your podcast

• Send out an email newsletter about the new post

• Tease the main points of the post in a TikTok or Reel

This might seem like a lot of extra work, but it truly maximizes the work you’re already investing to create the content in the first place. If you don’t promote your content, it’s like letting all that hard work go to waste.

Is your content valuable to your target audience?

So maybe you’re thinking, I have my KPIs, I’m testing new strategies, and I’m promoting my content religiously, but it’s still not bringing me closer to my goal. In this case, it’s time to take a sober look at the content you’re putting out in the world. Is it just promoting your product or service? Or is it genuinely offering tangible value to your target audience?

The point of creating content isn’t only to sell more product. While we want to see sales improve, it’s an indirect outcome of your work. The direct outcome of content marketing is building a relationship with your customers and establishing yourself as an authority in your field. If you’re not doing that, then content marketing isn’t going to work for you.

This is why it’s important to be creating content of value for your customers. The more your customers look forward to reading your weekly newsletter or to seeing your Instagram story, the more likely it is they’ll turn to your brand when they’re ready to make a purchase. 

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If you want to start seeing results from your content marketing strategy, we’re here to help. Cre8tives.co can handle everything from tracking KPIs to developing a winning content strategy to getting your content noticed. All you have to do is enjoy the results!

Ready to get started? Send us a message here.