Content marketing sputtering a bit? Here's where to start

A few years ago content marketing was the dorky new kid on the playground. It looked normal, it sounded smart, but something wasn't quite what people were expecting. As the story often goes, the early bird got the worm; the nerd married the prom queen; and so forth.

Today, many early adopters of content marketing are reaping the benefits (high rankings on Google and engaged customers, to name a few), at least that's the case for those who aggressively try, try, tried new methods within the ecosystem of content marketing.

But what also happened (and is still happening) during that time of tremendous, massive, exciting growth? A lot of self-proclaimed experts hit the ground running to sell massively over-priced services to small- and medium-sized business owners. A few examples I've encountered include $3,000 for SEO specialists who plugged keywords into the back of a website, and the guy who sold a website with seven (yes, 7 pages) of content for $12,000.

For those folks who gave content marketing what they thought was a good investment, the trouble now is that this shiny thing or that fun trick doesn't seem to be working. To put it simply:

Content marketing is sputtering for a lot of businesses.

And they don't know where they went wrong.

The good (and bad) news is: you're not alone. But there are a few questions you can use to start the process of self diagnosis.

1. Was my content marketing plan built on the proper marketing foundation?

Every good content marketing plan should start and end with a continually growing knowledge of your audience. This means you should have a semi-intimate relationship with your marketing persona. Next, did you conduct research to make sure your audience was looking for you online? There are plenty of statistics about how everyone's using Google, but while that's true, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're looking for your business. Some tried-and-true industries are entrenched in good, old-fashioned face-to-face networking, and your content marketing plan should know how to blend with some traditional marketing approaches such as direct mail.

2. Did my resources/marketing experts make recommendations because they understood my business?

If you work in a highly regulated industry, the first thing a marketing resource should seek to understand is the landscape of those swampy grounds. If you're the owner of a startup, any marketing expert worth his/her salt should've encouraged you to tap the breaks on fancy bells and whistles and point you in the direction of a resource that helps grow your audience. (What good is a $50,000 website before there is no traffic?) 

3. Am I speaking to my audience in a relevant way?

Talking to your audience online is no different than talking to a new friend. At first, you might not truly understand one another, but in time when you seek to learn and benefit that person, the conversations eventually feel somewhat (though, no always) effortless. This is what good content marketing equips businesses to do: it becomes a vehicle for building a relationship with their audience. It also provides opportunities to be proven wrong in our assumptions about their needs (and thus produce a better product or service). Have you been paying attention to how your audience wants to hear from you?

It's a good time to be in content marketing because the trail blazers have taken a lot of the guessing out of the how in content marketing. Make sure you're on the path to benefit from the innovation that's sure to come this year and in 2016. And if you're not quite sure what the heck is going with your content marketing, reach out to us and we'll be glad to help.