You know you need to continue to create useful content for your customers, but you sometimes wonder whether or not you are making the best use of your valuable time. You often find yourself in a crunch and rush to put together a blog that serves very little use to your customers but you publish it anyway just to get something out.
However, failures can be a great learning experience. Recognizing mistakes can provide great insight into what not to do the next time around. Below are 4 ways why your content is lacking.
1. Recruit expert contributors
You’re going to need a coalition of the willing. Remember, content marketing efforts struggle because they’re often under-resourced. This is where your diplomatic capabilities come in. The best content marketing programs involve dozens of contributors.
The more people involved, the less taxing it is on everybody. Recruit the stars in your business. Show them the topics you’re looking for help with and tell them when you’ll need their assistance.
Get leaders involved first so they can set a participation example for the rest of the team. Most importantly, don’t ask them to write the piece from scratch. Just request a brief interview. Use the writing skills in your marketing team or at your agency’s disposal to craft an original piece.
2. You’re not using the right type of content
Another factor to examine is the type of content you are focusing on. While blog posts are regarded as the gold standard for generating quality leads, there’s much more to content marketing.
Whether you need to determine which content to use to enhance the quality of your blog posts or to learn what additional channels are right for your organization, determining the type of content to use is a big decision.
Why? Because, no matter how much Bulletproof Coffee you’re drinking, you only have so much time and energy to direct towards your content marketing.
3. Content marketing services
Content marketing services will help you increase website traffic from your online marketing channels. It will help you take people from other online channels to your website.
These online marketing channels maybe social media, search engines, or your email marketing efforts. A solid content writer will produce relevant content to engage your audience, build trust, and influence their purchasing decisions.
Most content marketing services include strategy development, content writing, editing, and publishing to your website.
4. Not using keyword research
Before starting your content planning you need to confirm that what you will be writing about is something that your audience has been searching for. Keyword research is a great way to validate interest in your selected topic.
And despite advances in search algorithms, such as Google’s Hummingbird update, keyword usage is still important. Choosing the right ones can dramatically increase the performance of your content over its lifespan. A quick way to validate your keyword choice and even discover new topic ideas based on a root keyword is to use Google’s undocumented autosuggest API.