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How a Poorly Executed Content Strategy Can Eliminate Your Full Potential

How a Poorly Executed Content Strategy Can Eliminate Your Full Potential

by | Jul 29, 2015 | Content Marketing

Sarah Shade is one of our Content Specialists at Express Writers.

Content strategy.

You and I both (as good Internet marketers) know all about these by now.

Without one, it’s like trying to find a black cat in a dark room without a light bulb.

But did you know that a poorly executed content strategy can be even more harmful than not having one at all?

Even Harvard Business Review notes that most management professionals agree that a mediocre strategy that is executed well trumps a great strategy that is executed poorly.

In the realm of content strategy this is usually the case, although some exceptions to the rule do stand out.

Sarah Shade Quote

Don’t let a bad content strategy get you down.

The How-To’s of Content Strategy Development

In order for a content strategy to be successful, it must first be properly defined. Far too often, marketing professionals underestimate how important it is to undertake the basic steps of content strategy development. Like any good plan, a well-developed content strategy takes time and effort and no small amount of consideration. Even Forbes notes that even though content marketing can be complicated, it’s not in your best interests to put it on the back burner or ignore it altogether.

Getting to Success – When Your Content Strategy Comes Together

It’s a wonderful feeling to realize that your content strategy is coming together. All your key performance indicators are pointing towards a steady increase in traffic and your company’s name is on the public’s tongue. They know who you are and what you stand for. You’ve even managed to convince users to evangelize for you and things could not be better. In a perfect world, this would be what you’d come to expect from content marketing strategies. The truth of the matter is that this is the exception, rather than the rule. There are so many things that could possibly go wrong with a content strategy that ends up with it performing far worse than it set out to do, or even doing the opposite and driving consumers away from your site.

How Content Strategies Fail

If a content strategy is not delivering to its fullest potential the fault may lie in one of two places. Firstly, in the initial setup of the content marketing strategy there could have been a number of problems with how you approached the problem. On the other side of the coin are the problems that occur with the strategy that happen after its implementation. Both planning-level snafus and implementation level mistakes can lead to a content strategy failing. Let’s take a closer look at where the process seems to break down in these two key areas.

4 Major Planning Level Failures

In planning level failure, a content strategy is doomed from the time it’s conceptualized. Although this seems like a bleak prospect, it is usually the case when an unskilled content strategy team tries to develop a strategy plan without having a proper grasp of planning principles. There are a number of key areas where this problem can persist and lead to failure for the strategy, such as:

1. Wrong Target Demographic

While you would expect companies to know their own target demographic, you would be shocked to see how many of them aim their content strategy at a demographic that it doesn’t work for, while ignoring the demographic that it would appeal to best.

2. Not Budgeting Enough

Having a budget is a good thing in a corporate setting because it gives you a figure to work with regarding what you’re allowed for purchasing new content. However, budgeting too little can make you sacrifice quality in order to meet your quota.

3. No Clear Distribution Channels

Defining your distribution channels enables your content strategy to perform the way it was designed to. The distribution channels you choose should be the ones where your target demographic exists in large numbers.

4. Being Out Touch with your Audience

Content marketing has a marked focus on the audience you are creating content for. If you don’t know what drives your audience, what motivates them and what makes them take action, then you need to find out before embarking on a content marketing campaign.

Planning level failure isn’t the end of the world for a content strategy, however. Even though these things can limit the success (or even reverse it) for a content strategy, it is likely that the content management team will realize what’s going on and correct themselves before they get too far into content production.

Four Implementation Level Failures

This is where things get kind of complicated. At planning level failure it is a simple matter of fixing the behind-the-scenes work and redirecting resources where they have to go. When it comes to implementation level failure, things that go wrong here can severely damage the business image in the public eye. Depending on what goes wrong the impact could range from minor to catastrophic. Implementation level failure can include problems such as:

1. Failure to Streamline Content

Although not a capital sin, failing to streamline your already produced content can lead to users leaving your site as they get there. Things such as consistent typography, working external links and relevant topics of discussion all fall under this broad heading. Properly vetting your content through an audit is a great way to deal with this problem, although it can be time consuming.

2. Not Engaging your Audience Properly

The aim of content when developed in tandem with a strategy is to engage the audience so that they build a bond of loyalty with your brand or company. In order to engage your audience properly, you need to develop content that highlights hot-button topics and then discuss these over your comment section or on social media. Remember when discussing these things with your audience, it is recommended that you have a non-aggressive tone, even if members of the audience disagrees with your point of view.

3. Poor Quality Content

Probably the number one problem that strategists have when it comes to content marketing is having low quality content taking up space on their sites. One thing that most content gurus expound on ad nausea is that quality is far superior to quantity. If you produce one good content piece a day, it’s better than having twenty medium-to-low quality content pieces. Raising the quality of your content to high is essential to the success of any content strategy.

4. Content not SEO Optimized

In 2006, it was estimated that as much as 93% of all traffic originated from search engines. That’s a massive figure no matter how you slice it. That’s why your content needs to be optimized for SEO purposes. Good SEO optimization ensures that you get the most benefit out of your content and increase the amount of relevant traffic that search engines send your way. Having un-optimized content will mean you’re paying for good content that just doesn’t perform because it doesn’t have an audience to impact.

KMart on Black Friday: An Example of Social Media Failure

In 2013, KMart as eager to show off that they would be open for business on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. However, many of their Twitter followers criticized the decision, accusing the company of putting profits before family.

A company that had user engagement as one of its core tenets would have been able to diffuse this situation easily enough by showing how their workers were volunteering to work on that day.

However, with a brilliant combination of poor grammar, caveman-like sentence structure and a canned response, KMart managed to alienate its users and make them even more undesirable as a shopping location to a large swathe of their clientele.

JP Morgan Answers Questions on Twitter

KMart’s problem was that it probably had an inexperienced person running their Twitter account or that they just didn’t consider Twitter to be such a big deal. JP Morgan, however, knows how much or a big deal Twitter is when it comes to content marketing. They hosted a session where users would chime in with questions for the financial juggernaut that they hoped would be stimulating conversation about the economy of the country. They clearly underestimated how little love Twitter users had for them, from the responses.

https://twitter.com/dudestravel/status/622758693713612800

https://twitter.com/hcwcars/status/611478824845471744

At least they realized how out of touch they were with the audience before it got too out of hand.

Avoiding Content Strategy Failure

To be completely honest, no content strategy will succeed 100% of the time.

Just like everything that deals with human nature, the success of a content strategy depends upon timing and the willingness of the public to accept it.

Content strategies that would have been very successful in 2012 would leave audiences scratching their heads in 2015.

To minimize the margin of failure, you need to be aware of your audience. You need to understand what they need and the best way to provide it for them. Most importantly, you need to know how your audience views your company or brand to avoid making massive blunders that could affect your corporate image. When all is said and done, the final success of your content strategy lies in the hands of your audience.

7 Ways to Show the World You’re Worth Listening To

7 Ways to Show the World You’re Worth Listening To

by | May 29, 2015 | Content Marketing

You know that there is no business like show business, right? But who is to say exactly what is meant by “show business”? When you create content, you do so in an attempt to show readers that you know what you are talking about and that they should go to you if they want to learn more or use your service/product.

So when it comes to the show business of content creation, how can you make sure your writing is a box office smash? (Or at least a cult hit or award favorite)?

7 Methods To Shout From the Rooftops (Or Get Your Content A Lot of Viewers)

There are actually a lot of things you can do to make sure your content is seen by a whole lot of viewers, but here are seven good places to start.

1. The Preview Looked Good: Use Social Media to Attract Readers. Have you ever determined whether you would see a movie based off of its preview? There is a good chance that you have. Here are some things that my friends and I have been known to say after a preview:

  • “I didn’t think I would want to see that, but the preview looked good.”
  • “The preview looked funny, but they probably put all the funny parts in it. So it’s probably not going to be that good.”
  • “I’m disappointed. I thought I was going to like it, but not if the preview is anything to go by.”

You have probably said something similar at some point too. So what does that mean for content production?

It’s not just the writing itself that counts, it is all the small, social media content you do along the way to advertise for your content. What you say in the Tweet, Facebook post, or summary can be just as important as the actual content.

Because it is what viewers are most likely to see first, it is the main component in deciding whether they are going to read on. So you have to grab their attention there if you want to have any chance at grabbing their attention in the long-form post.

Moral of this point: If you can’t catch them in the previews, then you are not likely to catch them at all.

2. Be the Headliner: Create Good Headlines. Just like it is the star headliner that is going to draw a lot of the crowd, it is your catchy headline that is going to get people interested in reading your content. So you know that you need to work hard on crafting a great title.

Knowing you need a good headline and actually being able to come up with one, though, are two very different things. Not only do you have to get your creative juices flowing in order to write a good title, you also have stop trying so hard because people can always tell when you are trying too hard.

Luckily for all of us, there are all sorts of tools to help us create amazing titles.

  • Advanced Marketing Institute. The AMI has a headline tool that allows you to enter your headline and have its Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) ranked. It then walks you through how many EMV words a good headline should have and what type of EMV words you are using (e.g., intellectual EMV).
  • Crazyegg Blog. This post walks you through several ways almost guaranteed to convert readers and tells you why they are successful.
  • The Future of Ink. This post basically gives you some fill in the blank headlines that you can use with your own content.

Moral of this point: If the headliner isn’t drawing in crowds, then everything else had better be a hundred times better to make up for it.

3. Open Strong: Create Catchy Intros. After the opening night of a movie or play, reviews are going to come in. That opening could just make or break the show because if it gets all bad reviews, people aren’t likely to come back for the rest of the performances.

Think of your opening paragraph as the one that is going to get you the initial reviews. People are going to read it, and then they are going to determine whether they want to read more. If your intro paragraph is getting bad reviews, then no matter how good the rest of the content is, people likely aren’t going to be reading it.

On the other hand, if you capture the attention of your readers from your opening lines, then you have a better chance of making it to the end of your run (i.e., getting people to read the entire article.) So don’t ignore that opening paragraph or rush through it to get to the meat of what you are trying to say.

Moral of this point: If you want a long run, make sure you get good reviews from the opening.

4. You’re Gonna Be in the Pictures: Use Images. I’m making a long, drawn out analogy here comparing writing to show business, so you can see why images are going to be an important component to what I am saying. If you want to be a success in show business, then you need to actually show something.

People like pictures. It’s just a fact of life. That’s why they say a picture is worth a thousand words. A good image will draw the eye so that the potential reader can see that great headline you created, which will cause them to read that opening line that is going to get you great reviews, which will make them read whatever it is you have to say. And all because you caught their eyes with a good image.

Images could even help your SEO ranking because Google loves images as much as us mortals. You can find free images on places such as Wikimedia Commons or by searching Flickr’s creative commons images. You can also set up accounts on platforms such as iStock in order to find pictures.

Moral of this point: People love going to the pictures, so give them a picture worth seeing.

5. Take 5: Use Breaks Wisely. Looking at a giant block of text is bound to give you a headache. It doesn’t matter what it says, it just looks intimidating. Think about going to a play. You are going to have notable act breaks and likely an intermission. Even movies, which very rarely have intermissions unless they are three plus hours long, have Act and Scene breaks. Imagine watching a movie that was done all in one shot. Sounds dull to me.

When you are writing any type of long-form content, you need those “Act” and “Scene” breaks not only to help guide the flow of the piece, but to keep from scaring off potential readers.

In order to do this, use subheadings (and give them the same consideration you give the title), bullets, numbers, charts, images, etc. Just whatever you do, don’t create a giant body of text and expect people to want to read it.

Moral of this point: Give people short breaks so that they can digest all of the great performances they have been watching (or reading as the case may be.)

6. Lights, Camera, Action: Don’t Just Use a Bunch of Words, Say Something Important. Everybody wants to see it because of the previews, the headliner is drawing lots of attention, the images are stunning, and the actual movie is … blah. This could be a big flop on Rotten Tomatoes. What went wrong?

You can do everything else exactly right, but it does not mean anything if the actual content is bad. People want action. They want plot. They want to be able to trust the piece they are reading. Don’t just say words to fill in space. Make every word count, and back up your claims with proof.

If you give people interesting content and prove that you aren’t just making things up, people are going to enjoy what you have to say and believe that you are an expert. That is the way you will become a success.

Moral of this point: Without a believable plot, no one is going to like the story.

7. They’ll Remember the Closing Act: Leave Them Wanting More. Now that you have done everything right, end strong. People like endings. Just recently, one of my friends was discussing a book with me, and he said that the book was good, but then it just kind of ended. He wouldn’t recommend it because he hated when books did that. What does this tell you? Wrap things up if you want to leave people satisfied.

When they are finished reading, people should have all their questions answered. What was the point of what they just read? Why were you the right person to tell them about it? And, perhaps most importantly, what should they do next?

In order to close strong, wrap up all your points. Did you ask why carrots are orange in the beginning, but you never finished with the answer? Then you aren’t finished yet. Did you write a great post, but never explained why the post was written? Then you aren’t finished yet.

The ending is where you can place your call to action if you have one – such as donate to a cause or fill out a form. It is also where you make sure all of your points are wrapped up.

Moral of the point: When they leave, the ending is what they’ll remember most: make sure they remember something great.

Successful Content Is Like A Well-Oiled Machine

Just like a movie is not just a preview or a scene or an actor, a good piece of writing is not just one thing. In order to be successful, you have to make sure everything is working together to be the exact thing your reader needs. Only then will it be successful.

Photo credit: Dmitrii Kotin/iStock