When marketers invest a great deal of time, work, and research into creating new strategies, but they don’t receive the results that compare to the effort dedicated it’s extremely disheartening. If your content marketing strategy isn’t working for you, immediately stop the process.

You shouldn’t beat yourself up for not getting the results you were expecting, but instead, switch gears and move in a different direction with your content campaign and other marketing mediums that may work better for your company.

Content marketing is continually changing. Trial and error is great (and necessary) to a certain extent, but it’s important to identify what isn’t working and not repeat it. This article will explain to you the different signs to be aware of if you need to start reconsidering your content marketing strategy.

1) You’re Not Properly Tracking Your Efforts

1) Follower Growth
2) Site Visit
3) Page Visit
4) Social Media Likes
5) Growth in Followers

These quantitative measures are valuable for measuring what channels your customers are responding to, and what outlets you can improve upon to receive higher outcomes.

Social Media

It is helpful to include relevant hashtags and drive discussion. This will get your audience more engaged and curious about what you have to offer.

You can monitor your followers on social media by the number of followers and likes that you have on post. For email subscribers, you can track the open rate of the email and the click rate on the various links involved.

Social media won’t be valuable for measuring how good your content is, but it can quantify your success with your promotional effort.

Web Traffic

You should try to work through different channels or various structures of content that appeal to the market you are striving to reach.

Google Analytics allows you to examine your website traffic. You should also pay attention to the time spent on each page, the number of visitors to your page, and the bounce rate. These variables will indicate the engagement of your audience.

If you receive results reporting an increase in website traffic but no change in engagement, this shows that your promotional strategy is working, but your content may need to change.

2) You’re Not Focusing on Your Usage of Visuals

1) Images
2) Videos
3) Slideshow Presentations
4) Charts/Diagrams
5) Infographics

These visuals may make or break your content marketing strategy. Depending on your product or service, you must consider what the most effective way is to present your product on a page.

1) Your audience’s interest
2) The visual framework
3) The facts and statistics are up-to-date and accurate
4) Choosing a topic with viral interest

Poorly displayed graphics will make people want to click off your page before even reading the content. The only thing worse than bad content is associating it with poorly thought out visual. Always try to prioritize quality when considering visual content because it will be the first thing your audience lays eyes on when opening your page.

3) You’re Not Experiencing Any Success With Your Content Promotion

1) Reach out to influences to be featured on their blogs
2) Share your post on a variety of social media accounts
3) Contact industry blogs and pitch yourself
4) Publish your content to your mailing list
5) Link to other blog posts on your site

4) Your Strategy Has Become Scattered

However, there is a fine line between tactful persistence and downright obnoxious badgering.

Devise a strategy that allows you to save time when developing your content. Creating a documented content strategy isn’t just for the sake of saying that you have a documented strategy, but it is vital for your team to be on the same page, have outlined key points, and to have an established end goal.

The Content Marketing Institute’s Report on 2018 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, found that respondents who have a “documented content marketing strategy report higher levels of overall content marketing success compared to those who have a verbal strategy only, or no strategy at all.” They found that common reasons for lack of development were due to a small team, lack of time, unimportant, or that it wasn’t needed, but companies can’t focus on the negatives.

Creating a strategy only allows you to save time when developing your content. Creating a documented content strategy isn’t for the sake of saying that you have a documented strategy, but it is vital for your team to be on the same page, have outlined key points, and to have an established end goal.

If you want to execute an effective campaign, it is beneficial to have your ideal target customer in mind. This makes the process easier by having a set of critical points, values, and desires that you want to focus on. If you are having trouble figuring out your target customer, run content experiments regularly to test out channels and new streams of leads.

5) You’re Forcing Content Creation to Meet Deadlines

If you find that your audience lacks engagement to your content and that it is barely related to the primary purpose of the company, your content is going in the wrong direction. Your material should be sought out and enjoyed by your prospects.

Your content should be positioned to either answer questions, teach your audience, or convince your customers about something.

Your content should deliver quality over quantity. It is more important to have content that contributes value to your page rather than a long post that doesn’t generate any activity.

Focusing on interesting, relevant content helps build loyal customers and makes them come back for more. In the end, you want your content to be applicable, timely, valuable, and amusing for your audience to read and relate to.

To Wrap It Up…

It’s pretty rare for your first marketing campaign to be a success. It may take a few months, or even years, to get the real results you have been hoping for.

Once you realize your strategy is not working correctly, start to research, rethink, and redevelop new ideas that will drive your content in the right direction. It is not worth your time and effort to continue to release content that isn’t getting you anywhere. It is vital for you to evaluate the different signs listed above to see whether your content marketing strategy is working well for you.

Chainlink Can Help

Using our proprietary platform, the Chainlink Marketing Platform to ensure success based on data tracking and reporting, we can manage your overall marketing efforts and ensure they produce measurable results.

As experts in SEO and content marketing, our team can help you make sure you’re implementing strategies that deliver measurable results and produce the highest possible marketing ROI for your business.

Reach out to us to learn more about how we can help your business grow online. We’d love to give you a free consultation.

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