December 1, and it’s time to think about how to truly nail your content in 2016. I’m not touting a lose-weight-fast or get-rich-quick New Year resolution (those are usually broken by the next week). I’m talking about long term, dedicated strategy–and a vantage point that will get you winning content this upcoming New Year.
Right now, there are about 80 million millennials living in the US. That translates to about ¼ of the total population and since this group wields a buying power of about $200 billion dollars, they’re currently the single most lucrative market in all of advertising.
That said, you probably want to reach out to them with your content in 2016, right? They will be a bigger demographic than ever next year – they are the big, smart, and buying crowd YOU need to attract. Just how do you go about it?
We have some tips to help.
10 Tips to Effectively Market to Millennials with Your Content in 2016
1) Get authentic
Millennials spend about 25 hours each week online and they want authentic content. Buttoned-up ‘50s style marketing tactics don’t work on this crowd and they’re scouring blogs, social media, and websites for content they can truly connect with.
In fact, 43% of millennials rank authenticity as more important than content when they consume news and, as a result, they’re on the search for content that mimics their feelings, opinions, and passions while also offering unique value and a distinct voice.
Take Taco Bell, for example, which recently began a program to reach out to millennials with its “Millennial Word of the Week” program. This program makes the brand appealing, approachable, interesting, and relatable. Plus, since the whole program is curated by Taco Bell employees the same age as millennials, it’s authentic, which is what millennials have been looking for this whole time.
2) Focus on inbound
Have you ever been curious how many millennials will gladly navigate away from your page due to an unwelcome or intrusive ad? The grand majority of them, that’s how many. In fact, according to Wired, millennials alone have killed off several outbound marketing tactics that are inauthentic, invasive, or not valuable. What’s more, 84% of millennials just plain don’t trust traditional advertising, which creates a sticky situation for advertisers.
This is true because millennials know what they want, they’re tech-savvy enough to find it online, and they’re not willing to suffer websites that make them sit through unwanted or intrusive ads. When millennials spend time online, they’re doing research via social media, blogs, websites, and YouTube, which means that inbound marketing tactics are the best and the only way to reach them. By focusing harder than ever before on creating and distributing high-quality, relevant content that actually meets the needs of millennials and helps to answer their questions, you can ensure that your site doesn’t earn a swift “back” click.
3) Strive to be informative
Possibly more so than any generation before them, millennials are hungry for information, and this means that they’ll support businesses that are dedicated to offering informative content. Millennials are drawn to eBooks, videos, tutorials, blog posts, how-to’s, and customer reviews more than they are product listings, and this means that if you can create content in 2016 that offers an expert’s perspective on an everyday challenge, millennials are going to bite.
This is because millennials are 247% more likely than their older counterparts to be influenced in sales decisions by blogs and social media. With that in mind, consider offering tutorials and videos for your millennial customer base. Keep in mind that considering their tech-savvy nature and their propensity for sharing, they’re much more likely to share your video than they are to pull your flier off of a bulletin board and pass it around to their friends.
4) Focus on tailor-made
Millennials are plentiful, powerful, wealthy, and what else – oh yeah! They’re smart too. This means that millennials have a stronger-than-usual B.S. detector and they’ll be onto you in an instant if you create content in 2016 that’s meant solely to get into their pocketbooks.
Instead, focus on creating educational content that caters to their interests. One great way to do this is to focus on selling a lifestyle rather than a product. This means that you should be showcasing the ways in which your product, good, or service can help enhance their lives, produce unforgettable experiences, and equip them with great stories. Trust us, these things are far more valuable to millennials than product descriptions on some stagnant web page.
5) Get collaborative
42% of millennials want to help companies develop products and services and that’s why it pays to use them as a resource when creating products for consumption. Consider, as an example, Lays’ “Do us a Flavor” campaign in which they encourage consumers to come up with the next potato chip flavor to be marketed in stores.
Campaigns like this make millennials the co-creators of a company and increase the likelihood that they’ll buy your product once it hits the market. It also engages their sense of self-expression and personal branding, helping to fuel the values of individuality and uniqueness in marketing, sales, and beyond.
6) Consider the difference between usage and ownership
According to HubSpot, millennials prefer to use things rather than own them. Rather than owning housefuls of things they only seldom need, millennials would rather pay full price to rent items when they need them. Consider examples of this like Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, and Rent the Runway, a popular rental clothing site. To apply this to your content, consider creating forms of content like classes, webinars, and eBooks that millennials can rent rather than buy.
7) Offer a full-spectrum experience
Unlike their Baby Boomer parents, millennials may actually enjoy the act of shopping more than actually purchasing items. This explains the popularity of sites like Pinterest and Etsy and provides a definite edge for any content creator that can master the art of providing a web-based exploration experience for audiences. To apply this to your content, link content with social sharing sites like Pinterest and ensure that everything you create is designed to effectively inspire and engage your millennial audience into activity.
8) Optimize for mobile
Millennials live on their mobile devices and if you’re not optimizing your content to accommodate that, you’re going to miss out on a great deal of business. In 2015, active social media accounts saw a 23% increase, which equates the creation of over 300 million accounts.
This means that all of your content, social, and other sharing should be optimized for mobile. To do this, pay attention to in-stream photo requirements for sites like Twitter and ensure that you’re embracing content forms like vertical video (very few mobile users ever rotate their phones to watch videos). This holds true for everything except for YouTube, in which case horizontal videos are still king.
9) Get on the video train
In 2014, Facebook began slogging into the world of video content and sharing and, by 2015, Mark Zuckerberg announced that more than 3 billion videos are shared and viewed daily on Facebook newsfeeds around the world.
The reason for this is that 67% of millennials believe that videos produce more relatable content than TV. What’s more, 63% of millennials report that they would try a brand or item recommended by a YouTube personality quicker than they would one recommended by a television personality. While this trend may seem startling, it’s a clear call to marketers everywhere to start producing more video content. With platforms like Snapchat, Meerkat, and Periscope on the rise, it’s obvious that video content is truly the content of the future.
10) Be fluid
Millennials are the most tech-savvy generation in history and they’re also the most innovative. While they play a large part in consuming the content of today, they’re also behind the scenes, developing new tech, producing new apps, and altogether changing the world as we know it.
While the previous 9 tips hold true for today and the foreseeable future, it’s important for marketers to continue to be fluid and adaptable with their content. This means not getting stuck in boxes or being afraid to try new things. As millennials continue to change the world, content will need to change to keep up with them and the marketers that can accommodate this are the ones that will succeed.
Conclusion
It’s an exciting time to be a marketer and as we draw closer to 2016 one thing is sure: millennials have and will continue to inform the direction of content far and wide. This is a great thing, though, as it drives innovation and positive change, and the marketers who can embrace it and continue to reach out to millennials through their content are the ones who will experience content marketing success as they continue to publish even better content in 2016.
Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at Express Writers!
This Thanksgiving season, we hope you’re enjoying some well-earned time off!
That being said, in our industry, we don’t really see it as time off from content creation. That’s because Thanksgiving is a great time to create some seriously fun content. The festiveness of the season and the air of celebration in the air mean that Thanksgiving is a wonderful time to create and distribute content your readers will love.
Just how do you go about this?
5 Thanksgiving Content Tips Readers Will Love
Don’t be a turkey, make holiday content work for you this Thanksgiving Day! Here are five of our top holiday content tips for creating memorable Thanksgiving-themed content.
1. Snap and Share Photos of Your Holiday Celebration
40% of people respond better to visual content than they do text, so don’t hesitate to take some photos this holiday season. Don’t be shy to share your personal festivities!
A photo posted by Condé Nast Traveler (@cntraveler) on
Snap pictures of your movements throughout the Thanksgiving holiday, whether you volunteer, spend time with family and friends, eat a turkey or a ham, or spend it away from the snow in someplace tropical.
Consider dedicating a blog entirely to photos and then encourage your readers to submit their own photos in the comments. Visual content is a big deal right now and creating some of your own can help people connect to your content and feel the Thanksgiving cheer!
2. Share Traditions
You look forward to it every Thanksgiving: Grandma’s creamy, gooey, delicious pumpkin pie – the recipe for which she got from her grandmother. Why not share the love this Thanksgiving and share the recipe with your fans?
Doing this provides value on a few different levels: first of all, you’re giving your readers something actionable that they can apply to their lives and, secondly, you’re giving them pie and who doesn’t love pie?
If you don’t have a coveted family recipe to share with your readers, consider telling them about the traditions you do have over the holidays and then encourage them to share their traditions as well. This engages readers in your content and helps them feel seen, respected, and cared for by your brand.
3. Give Back
Do you have something that can benefit someone else? Why not use the Thanksgiving holiday as an opportunity to give it away? Whether you run a class that can help fans learn something new or you sell a product that can enhance people’s lives, Thanksgiving is the ideal time to run a promotion that allows your customers to enter for a chance to win.
Holiday promotions give people something to get excited about and, in advance of the Christmas holiday, promotions may even help your customers get that special someone a gift they’ve always wanted.
No matter how you choose to structure your promotion, Thanksgiving is shouldered by two of the biggest shopping days of the year (Black Friday and Cyber Monday) so this is a great time to give some gifts and share the joy!
4. Share What You’re Thankful About
What is Thanksgiving all about, after all? One of the best ways to create great content this Thanksgiving is simply to be thankful! Be thankful for your readers and your business partners and all of the people who have helped you get where you are today and then tell them so.
Consider sending your readers a heartfelt “thank-you” email or offering small incentives as a showing of your gratitude. No matter what you choose to do, Thanksgiving is a fantastic time to let the people near you know exactly how much you appreciate them.
5. Try New Things
If you’ve never done a podcast before but Crazy Aunt Lisa is coming to Thanksgiving dinner and she’s got some serious stories, right now might be a great time to dip your foot into a new content form.
Whether you’ve been meaning to move from short-form to long-form or textual to visual, the Thanksgiving holiday is a great time to take advantage of the abundance of your surroundings to step into uncharted content waters.
In addition to keeping you on your creative toes, this can also help you keep your site fresh and keep readers interested.
Take These Content Tips and Go Forth!
There you have it – our top 5 content tips for creating great marketing this Thanksgiving season. While we hope that your Thanksgiving holiday inspires you to crank out some exciting new content, we also hope that your Thanksgiving holiday is filled with all the things that are really important: friends, family, and happiness for one and for all!
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours from the Express Writers team.
What if you could take one great idea and turn it into dozens of even better blogs?
You actually can—with a process called serialization.
Content serialization, once a tool in the belt of novel-writers worldwide, has become a popular blogging tactic today that can help writers dig deeper and provide an astounding amount of value to their readers.
Content serialization is more than just drawing out an idea; it’s a particularly effective way to become an expert in your niche, draw more readers, promote your site and gain visibility.
What is Content Serialization?
Content serialization is essentially one large idea broken down into installments for easier readability and a higher level of mastery. “Content marketing”, for example, is a large topic. It would be impossible to cover everything that content marketing is and offers in one blog post and, as such, it’s an ideal topic for serialization.
A serialized run of blog posts with a focus on content marketing might look something like “12 Weeks to Outstanding Content Marketing” and would offer periodic blog posts diving deeper into progressively more challenging areas of the topic.
Serialization offers bloggers a way to get out of the habit of thinking of their content marketing strategy in terms of individual posts, which can inhibit creativity and contribute to poor content and very little site cohesion. Good short-term serialization can help content marketers shake up their strategy and dig deeper into topics their audience wants to know more about.
Why Serialize Content?
In the days of olde, bibliophiles used to hang out on shipping docks, anxiously awaiting the next serialized installment of a favorite book to arrive. Things have modernized since then, but serialization still has the power to create anticipation and keep people coming back for more.
By serializing content that is of interest to readers, content marketers can easily reap the following benefits:
More Readers: Like we said, serialization promotes anticipation and people will soon be looking out for the next post in the series. Additionally, since each post builds off of the post before it, serialization is an amazingly effective internal linking strategy that drives users to other portions of the blog.
More Creativity: Serializing your content forces you to dig into the cracks, so to speak, and can help your writing become much more creative. Additionally, since serialization requires you to plan each post ahead of time and come up with a considerable amount of content, it is likely that the process will also drive you to employ social media formats, such as video, podcasts or infographics, that you do not typically use. For this reason, serialization is a great way for bloggers that are “stuck” to get the creative juices flowing.
Increased Productivity: Since you’ll have to come up with regular and substantial posts, you’ll be forced to make the best possible use of each day’s writing time. This, in turn, promotes better writing and more effective communication.
Mastery of Knowledge: By far the most valuable benefit of serialization is that it allows bloggers to become niche experts. By digging into the nooks and crannies of a subject, writers can learn new things and disseminate information effectively without overloading their audience or saturating a single post with so much information that it’s virtually useless. Additionally, serialization allows you to build your online authority.
More Conversions: Serialized content provides value for people interested in learning more about a topic. When you provide value to readers, they reward you with increased interaction, subscriptions and purchases. Because of this, serialized content often results in increased conversions for your site. Regardless of what your site’s goal is – be it subscriptions, purchases, or shares – serialized content can definitely help you get there.
In addition to the above benefits, serialization can be a great option for bloggers who have not yet developed a content marketing strategy and are looking for ways to provide regular, high-quality content to their readers.
Choosing Which Content to Serialize
As a general rule, the content you serialized should be made up of your most high-potential topics. In other words, serialized topics should be those too broad, involved, detailed or important to be covered in a single post.
The genesis topic for serialized posts should be of great interest to your readers and broad enough to explore for a number of weeks without writing duplicate content or creating filler. Before you choose to serialize a topic, ask yourself these questions:
Will this information provide value to my readers?
Can I explore this topic in a unique way?
Could I write a book about this?
If the answer is “yes” to all of those questions, it’s likely that you’ve got a good candidate for serialization.
Keep in mind that it is not enough, however, to simply choose a topic that you find interesting. The topic also needs to serve a purpose and will be most successful if it meets an unmet need, offers a solution and is easy to structure.
As with any type of marketing, finding a gap in the market is one of the most important factors for success. If you choose to serialize a topic that’s been serialized hundreds of times before, it’s going to be difficult to be truly competitive in that market. Therefore, it’s important to choose a topic that addresses old questions in a new way or approaches a question that many people have an nobody is answering. By meeting an unmet need and providing unique solutions, you can ensure your content will stand out from the crowd.
How to Serialize Content
By far the easiest way to serialize content is to create a series of blog posts that spans no more than 12 weeks. This is enough time to adequately explore a topic but not so much that your readers begin to get bored. Regardless of what your topic is, the general structure of your serialized content should resemble the following:
Week 1 (First Post)
Week 1 will be the touch-point for your readers. That said, your first blog post should act like a value proposition. The post should introduce the series, explain its purpose to readers and help them understand exactly how it can help them, solve their problems, answer their questions or provide value in their lives.
To do this, your post needs to clearly outline what the weekly posts will cover. To make your outline compelling, write interesting headlines for each week that provide information about the problem or challenge being faced and how that individual post helps readers navigate around it.
Weeks 2-11 (Body Posts)
These posts should follow the outline you put forth in your initial post. Each post should adhere to a general length of your choosing and should offer a mixture of text and visuals or other media. In order to make each post as valuable as possible, be sure that you’re utilizing great blog-writing tactics like breaking up large bodies of text, utilizing headers and sub headers, incorporating images and writing magnetic titles.
Week 12 (Final Post in Series)
The final blog post in your series is almost as important as your first post. The final post should conclude the series by offering one final solution, nugget of information or hack, summarizing the information presented so far and outlining the importance of each week’s post.
The blog should end with a compelling call-to-action that directs readers toward whatever you want them to do, be it subscribing to your email list, purchasing your book or sharing your content. Additionally, the call-to-action could be used to launch a new product or promote an upcoming series.
By now, it’s likely that you will have gained considerably more readers and that those readers will be hungry for more of your content. Because of this, the end of a series is the ideal place to present a new product or ask your readers for subscriptions.
Content Serialization Success: The 4 Pillars
The entire point of content serialization is to provide in-depth, consistent value to readers and, when it’s done correctly, serialization can be an amazingly effective tactic for increasing a blog’s reach and catering to readers. In order for serialization to succeed, however, it must adhere to these 4 pillars:
Consistency: Serialization is nothing but a few haphazard blog posts if you don’t maintain a schedule. At the beginning of your series, choose one day a week when you’ll post your new installment. Be sure to tell your readers which day this is, as this will keep you accountable and also give your readers something to look forward to. The importance of having a regular blogging schedule cannot be oversold when it comes to serialization. Feel free to write additional posts during the week, but keep your series posts consistent and predictable.
Discovery: In order to be valuable, your serialized content needs to help your readers discover a new topic. When you bring a genuine excitement to your serialized content, that will translate to your readers and you’ll soon find yourself with a healthy following. Use your series to dig deeper into an interesting topic and disseminate that information to your readers. They’ll appreciate it, we promise.
Quality: Part of the purpose of running a series is to encourage bloggers to plan and develop a content marketing schedule. If you’re postponing your series post until the last minute and then writing sloppy content, you can bet it’s going to fail. Your readers should be able to expect a high-quality, informative post each week. When you deliver consistent quality, your series will be successful.
Accessibility: Regardless of who your target audience is, it’s important that each post you write is accessible to them. Don’t get too technical for beginners or too simple for people who already have some knowledge of the topic. Instead, ensure that your content is tailored to your readers and that each post in the series provides real, tangible value to your target audience.
The Case for Serialization
Serialization, when done well, is one of the best ways to boost your content marketing strategy and draw new readers to your site. Content serialization allows you to take one great idea or expansive topic and transform it into months of high-quality, original, shareable, authoritative posts, which is great for you and even better for your readers.
Annie is a Content Manager at Express Writers.
Developing a content strategy can easily seem like it can be a futile exercise.
Many people don’t have a clue about where to start when it comes to putting together a detailed plan for what their content should do and what sort of demographic it should be aimed at.
The truth of the matter is that overthinking content marketing can be dangerous.
Instead of focusing on the minor details, what you should be aiming for is to see the big picture.
It’s only through that you will actually be able to experience the true power of content marketing the way it was meant to be used.
The Blank Slate Theory & Your Content Strategy
As artist Joe Madureira says, a blank slate is as exciting as it is daunting. What we propose to do through a blank slate comparison is to see how a company starting from no website or content marketing strategy can utilize the tools of developing a content strategy to be successful. In this fictionalized case study we will be utilizing a two-phase plan for the creation of a detailed content strategy that can be used to improve a website’s ranking and visibility.
Methodology Behind Our Experiment
Utilizing a free tool like Google Analytics allows us to easily track the key performance indicators (KPI’s) that we’re interested in. Indicators such as number of visitors and unique visitors over time allow us to gauge the success of our content marketing strategy. If we want to be more specific we can set up funnels in Google Analytics in order to track clicks from what content leads to which page to determine the most popular content for attracting users. The numbers from Google Analytics will be our guide to how well our content strategy is doing, just like in real life.
Time to start working on that content strategy, if you haven’t already!
Content Strategy Phase One: The Basics
There are a handful of things that a basic content strategy should have in place as a jumping off point. These form the framework for your future content production and also aids in your SEO compatibility and your search rank score. These things are the very basics but even though they seem to be unnecessary at the start, they are a powerful means of attracting traffic and formulating leads. The basic start for a website’s content strategy comes from incorporating these key elements: 1. META tags: META tags aid in helping to describe a page’s content to a search engine. Including META tags in your site setup ensures that you are able to include the most important elements that you would expect to get your page noticed. The more relevant information you include in your META data the better your search relevancy will be. This translates into increased traffic from search engines, as relevancy is extremely important to users. No one wants to click a page and end up somewhere they didn’t expect to be. 2. Keywords: These are words that describe the content on your page and allow a user to be aware of what the site they are visiting is about. Used in combination with META description tags, your keywords form the backbone of your content strategy in the realm of SEO. You don’t want too much of your keywords cluttering up your page since search engines are usually wary of too high a keyword density. Ideally, your keyword density should lie between 3% and 5% for any particular keyword set. 3. Product Descriptions: These give your site the look and feel of a professional company and also gives Google something to reference. Your product descriptions should also have keywords considered and should conform to the limit of 3% to 5% as well. Keeping this figure is enough to satisfy the search engine that you’re not keyword stuffing just to make your content more popular. The descriptions should be meaningful as far as possible and written for the user. It’s a true test of balancing your content writing in order to appeal to both search engine robots and the average user. 4. Basic Content: Basic content gives your site a barebones for further development of content as time goes by. Through your basic content you are trying to attract users and at the same time get them to do something. Whether it’s subscribing to an email list or clicking over to a product page, your basic content should be original and should appeal to the customer. It should bring value to the customer’s life in some way. That is the hallmark of good content.
Content Strategy Phase Two: Advanced Operations
After setting up the initial barebones on the blank slate website, we can now proceed to monitor it for a period of time to see how it evolves and develops in terms of traffic. This sets a benchmark from where we can go on to the advanced part of the exploration and the key motivator for developing a content strategy.
Does content really make a difference in generating leads and increasing visits? Let’s find out by utilizing the major vehicles of content marketing: 1. Blogs: Blogging has long been accepted as one of the ways to generate traffic and to keep your website fresh to attract new visitors. Search engines enjoy blogs because they tend to deal with a particular niche and once the search engine determines the niche the blog is in it’s easy to direct relevant traffic to the site. Blogs allow for a company or website to focus on creating high-quality content that appeals to their target demographic. Through this content the company can generate new leads or conversions, or develop customer loyalty by focusing on providing useful content to their users. Blogs need to be updated regularly in order to remain relevant. Updating too much can cause useful information to be lost. There’s a fine balance to walk here, but doing it well is worth the effort. 2. Social Media: The newest way for websites to interact with customers directly and to generate leads is through content marketing on social media. The use of memetics and other content that attracts users to like or share allows a company to spread the word far and wide and to get a much more diverse outreach than with simple SEO marketing. The virality of social media content is what makes it attractive as a medium for content marketing. All it takes is the right combination of images, words and emotions to make a piece of content that could theoretically reach hundreds of thousands, even millions of people. Websites such as Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter have made it even easier for content marketers to share great content with their followers.
Expected Results
As is expected with a fledgling content strategy, it would take some time for the users to reach a trickle. Ideally, we would run this blank slate website against another website that has nothing on it as a control to see the difference in traffic between that control site and our site over a period of a few months. Because of our SEO work (META tags and content descriptions etc.) we expect to see a decent amount of traffic at the end of the first six-month period. At the end of this initial setup period we can then average the amount of visitors daily and keep that score as the benchmark against which our second phase can be tested.
Introducing the second phase allows us to see how much better content marketing is compared to a site that operates without it (presented by the data from our six-month phase-one trial). Because of the nature of content strategies and the methodology used, it can take a couple months before noticeable changes start happening.
This would be the case if and only if the chosen method of content marketing is done as intended (blogs updated on time, social media accounts focusing on a target demographic etc.). Over the next six months the performance of the site would increase quite a lot based on the use of content marketing.
Conclusions
If performed properly and under the best of conditions, this experiment would prove decisively if content marketing is truly beneficial to a company or brand.
Real-life case studies are readily available where brands tout the awesome capability of content marketing to drive traffic and generate leads (GE Reports immediately comes to mind). However, the real world is rarely as cut and dried as test situations.
Many times when companies undertake a content strategy, they try to minimize the cost and maximize the impact.
Although this strategy is admirable, there are some things you shouldn’t cut corners with. Updating regularly is one of them. Generating high quality content is another. The best way to ensure that your content is of the highest standard is to invest in a professional content production team to develop content for you on a regular basis. A content strategy has the potential to do great things for your traffic, it just has to be implemented properly.
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.
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.
@jennbrazen Kmart is staffing w/ teams & seasonal associates when possible, giving them opportunity to make extra money during holiday.
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.
It’s a #TwitterTakeover: We'll host our 1st live Q&A on leadership & career advice w/a leading $JPM exec on 11/14. Use #AskJPM to submit a Q
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.
