The Biggest Threats to Your Content Marketing Success and How to Avoid Them

Content marketing isn’t going away anytime soon. Your content marketing strategy might include blogging, email, social media, videos, guest posts, SEO, website and so much more. To be successful in your content marketing goals, you need to be strategic, timely and engaged.

A content marketing strategy isn’t something you do for just a few months. While it might change over time, it’s a continuous strategy you use to reach your target audience with the right message at the right time.

So as you hone your messaging and perhaps even start planning for 2021, here are some of the biggest threats to your content marketing success and tips on how to avoid them.

Misalignment on Goals

Goals play an important role in your marketing strategy. If your executive team, owners, and various stakeholders aren’t aligned on those goals, you’re going to face some serious challenges with finding success in your content marketing.

That’s because everyone will be looking for success in different places and different ways. Before you launch a content marketing strategy, you need to align as a team on the goals, expected outcomes and how you’ll measure success. That will help your strategy prosper.

Expecting Immediate Results

Content marketing is not like a Google Ads campaign, though that campaign might be a part of the larger strategy. But with a Google Ads campaign, you might see immediate results. Your website traffic increases, you start getting form fills for more information and you begin filling the funnel.

Content marketing that boosts your SEO and helps you learn what messages best resonate with your potential customers takes time. Seeing results in some aspects of your successful content marketing strategy, such as SEO, might mean waiting six months or longer.

Inconsistency

If you send out an email newsletter once in January, skip February entirely, then send four issues in March and don’t touch it again until June, you won’t get great results from your efforts.

The same is true about any aspect of your content marketing success. You need to be consistent and use consistent messaging. That doesn’t mean always saying the exact same thing.

Part of content marketing is testing out different messaging to learn what best resonates with your customers. What it does mean is setting a tone in your content marketing so that viewers know it’s you when they see something before they even see your company name or logo.

You need to be consistent about your frequency, messaging, target audience and more. If you’re constantly changing your focus and goals, you won’t be able to show any true success in your content marketing plans.

Cutting Back on Budget Once You Succeed in Content Marketing

Once a business reaches the top ranking on Google or achieves its lead generation goals before the end of the year, they sometimes cut their budgets because they’ve met their goals. There’s so much risk in this and it means they need to start back at the beginning in a few months when they realize the harm that cutting back has done.

Marketing is an always-on strategy. When you turn it off, you will likely turn off its results too. The cost to restart could far exceed the cost of seamlessly continuing.

Complacency

There is no comfort zone in effective marketing. The minute you think you’ve found it, you risk becoming complacent and slowing your marketing results.

Content marketers are always reading, innovating and staying up to date on trends in the industry. Complacency simply can’t happen in content marketing because once it does, you can’t adapt to the changing marketplace and your audience’s new needs and desires.

New Light Digital offers content marketing services to ensure your company’s marketing strategy is consistent, focused and evolving to meet the needs of your industry. Request a free quote for our services to learn more.