June 5th, 2019, Posted by Pixel Global
Content Marketing: Why is it so Important?
With the ever-expanding impact of digital marketing on the global market, the modes of conventional and traditional marketing are losing grounds with each passing day. Even when it comes to online marketing, the highly-advanced marketers are always on a look out for newer ways to market their services or products. In such a scenario, the traditional act of putting up mere advertisements is not enough anymore. The potential buyers of a service or a product are more interested to know about everything in detail, rather than just seeing an ad and going for it. And here enters the concept of content marketing which has largely occupied the panorama of online marketing in the present day.
Content marketing is a kind of strategic approach towards the development and distribution of relevant, value-added and essential content that will be able to attract the target audience. Content marketing has a certain goal – to make the readers aware and then make them interested in what they are now aware of. The logic is very simple here. Instead of merely pitching the services or products in front of the potential customers, content marketing helps in providing truly useful and relevant content to the audiences that can make them know more about the services or products and, at the same time, they will know why they need it and the solutions that they might get due to it. Therefore, this approach is important because it works way better than advertisements and other traditional methods.
Can Content Marketing Go Wrong?
Content Marketing has opened a whole new window in the world of digital marketing and almost every business, small or big, abides by the laws of content marketing in order to reach their targeted online viewers. But everything has its pros and cons, and this case is no different. Content marketing can be utterly tricky at times and it can go horribly wrong and leave you and your business devastated. Therefore, it is better to know about the signs that show that the content marketing strategies that you are implementing are going wrong in one way or the other before it is too late. In this blog, we are going to talk about the top seven warning signs that you need to notice to understand whether your content marketing is going in the wrong direction. Keep reading!
Signs that Prove that Your Content Marketing is Going in the Wrong Direction
1.Your Content Isn’t Properly Optimized
The first essential landmark of Content Marketing is definitely the optimization of content in order to reach the target audiences. There’s a common notion that if you want your audience to read the content that you have published (and ultimately invest money in your products or services), the content has to be too simple and easy to find. Otherwise, there’s no use. But in order to make your audience find the content, you need to adopt certain means to optimize the content. SEO-friendly content, written in crisp and easy language, is basically the key to reach the eyes and the minds of your audience.
Another important aspect here is that SEO is not needed merely for blog posts or articles published in your blog. It is equally important to optimize the entire content in the body of an existing website, including simple information, descriptions, status updates, new inputs, press releases, so on and so forth. Using appropriate keywords and applying other necessary SEO strategies throughout all the kinds of content that are being used in your website is highly recommended for enhancing the aspect of content marketing. This will help you in improving the rank of your website in the SERPs of most search engines. And in case you have not adopted this method already, then you might have been missing out on the most important aspect of content marketing all this while. Think about it!
2. You are Using Your Content Only For Publicity
The most imminent danger sign that proves that you have taken the wrong path in content marketing is that you are using your content only for the purpose of publicity and advertisement and the readers are not gaining anything from it. Don’t take this is a wrong sense. Yes, it is true, that content marketing is meant for publicity of the services and products that a business offers, but ‘marketing’ is not the only value that is attached to it. As stated very clearly in the introduction, the readers are supposed to gain something from the content that you are providing and the content has to be ‘relevant’, ‘value-added’, and ‘essential’. If your content is not of the kind that adds value to the life of the readers then there’s no meaning of publishing such content, isn’t it?
The general statistics prove that if more than 30% of the content is regarding publicity, then it is not regarded as content marketing but rather as a mere online advertisement. Most effective content marketing strategies are essentially based on the needs of the readers. Publish content according to what the readers want to know and not according to what you want to sell – this should be considered as the prime factor when you start your venture into the paths of content marketing. You need to develop a relationship of trust with the customers first through your content. Only then you can go ahead and say what you really want to put forward, otherwise, the whole exercise can go in vain more rapidly than you expect.
3. Your Content is Monotonous For Readers
Remember that you are developing the content and publishing it so that the readers can read it and gain knowledge. Never make the mistake of publishing dull content that is hard to be read till the very end. Readers tend to look for content that is interesting and appealing, boring content never clicks with the readers. Stretching a piece unnecessarily or for the sake of incorporating all relevant keywords can take a toll on the readers’ interest. Content marketing is all about catchy, useful, brief content that will make the readers interested in the products or services. Ordinarily-written content is still acceptable but the kind of content that can put your readers to sleep is a strict no-no!
There are some websites and webpages that are literally putting the keywords everywhere, without realizing that they are not making any sense at all. This is another mistake that makes the content boring. Optimization is necessary but over-optimization can lead to terrible consequences. The titles and heading all jumbled up with keywords randomly often creates a bad impression on the readers and spoils their interest. On the other hand, you can be heavily penalized for keyword stuffing. Therefore, you need content that has necessary keywords and yet that makes sense and interests the readers. Got our point?
4. You are Choosing Quantity Over Quality of the Content
The reason we all find unnecessarily lengthy and meaningless content all around us is that the relevant content marketing strategies are not being implemented. Content marketing is essentially done through brief yet meaningful content that is properly optimized, not content that is randomly put together and stretched to the maximum. Ordinary lengthy content that adds no value to life is not content marketing. Quality content, however, can actually work wonders for your website.
Filling up the whole website with purposelessly written content is not the motto here. There is this misconception that in order to reach more people you need to publish as much content as possible in a time. But this is not the way content marketing is done. The simple fact here is you need to choose quality over quantity. Even simple, catchy, informative hundred words can be more powerful than randomly written thousand words in a website. Remember that properly-structured, quality content is what you really need to attract readers.
5. Your Content is Not Driving Enough Traffic
Content marketing is not only about making the readers gain knowledge, but it is also about being found online by appropriate target audiences. If you are publishing quality content on your website and still not getting enough readerships, then what is the use? Here comes the necessity of proper SEO. As we discussed already, SEO strategies have to be implemented on the content in order to reach the maximum online crowd. In case you are not receiving the desired amount of traffic, then maybe those strategies that you are using are not in tune, or perhaps there is a gap between planning and implementation of SEO techniques that can enhance content marketing.
Another noticeable mistake that can take place, in this case, is the use of wrong keywords or use of keywords in a wrong manner. There is more than one example where the websites have been using the wrong keywords and, as a result, the traffic was decreasing day by day or the traffic flow became stagnant. Also, targeting the wrong audiences can also be an issue. You need to know your audience well so that you can use the relevant keywords, which will eventually increase the flow of traffic towards your website. Whichever might be the case, if your traffic flow is not increasing in spite of properly optimized quality content, it is high time that you have a thorough analysis of the SEO strategies that you have been implementing.
6. Your Content Has a Good Rank on SERPs But No One is Reading It
To start discussing this point, it has to be mentioned that it is not easy to gain a good rank on the search results. So if your content is appearing towards the beginning of any SERP, then congratulations for that. This means that your SEO strategies are fine and there’s no problem with regards to content optimization. Even then you are not receiving enough traffic? This means that readers are not really interested in reading your content. This is another low of content marketing that you might be a sign of danger.
Well, there can be a variety of reasons behind your content not receiving enough readers in spite of being on the top of results pages. The first likely reason can be that your SEO title of the content and the meta description are not attractive enough, they are not properly written or they don’t cover the topic of the query. This can be an issue when competing with other websites on the SERPs, especially if their title and meta description are more appealing and appropriate than yours. The title has to be such which compels the readers to click on it, whereas the meta description of a maximum 155 characters should give a brief idea of the points covered in the content. So if you are up for content marketing, make sure that the title and meta description are structured properly to attract more and more people.
7. Your Content Has A High Bounce Rate
According to Google Analytics, bounce rate can be termed as a figure that helps you understand whether the interested readers, who are clicking on your link, are immediately clicking off it as well or not. This has been an extremely important indicator when it comes to judging the performance and engagement rate of published content on Google. Higher bounce rates also indicate lower on-page time. Keeping track of the content’s bounce rate is highly essential in terms of content marketing as well as search optimization.
In case your content has a high bounce rate, then this is definitely not good news for you. It is a sign that your readers are not finding the content interesting enough or informative enough, or maybe both. At times, the low relevance rate of a content piece also ends up in higher bounce rates. There can be other reasons, like the piece of content is too long, the formatting is just too clumsy, the overall appearance of the webpage is not likable, the webpage is taking a lot of time to get loaded, and so on. All these reasons have to be carefully looked after if you want to do content marketing in the right way.
Here’s A Piece of Advice For You!
The popularity of content marketing is growing by the day and its value is increasing rapidly. Brands and businesses, big and small, are taking refuge to content marketing so that they may not be left behind. With the increasing popularity, being successful in this domain is becoming more complex as well. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should lose all your hopes. Now that you know your mistakes, it is high time that you should consider implementing newer and more powerful content marketing strategies and making necessary changes in the old ones that were wrong. Don’t let your rivals take you down so easily. Make the necessary corrections ASAP!