10 Reasons Content Marketing Fails (And How to Sidestep)

Have you ever tried to find out why your content marketing campaign never worked out and provide result as you expected?

What is the reasons content marketing fails all the time you use it?

Is content marketing dead?

Hell no.

Let me tell you why your content marketing campaign failed all the time.

It happened because you were following bad content marketing examples and never had a documented content marketing strategy.

One of the leading reason content marketing fails because people don’t document their content marketing strategy.

It takes time, effort and planning to build a content marketing strategy that work for business.

According to Kapost, B2B organizations waste around 1$ billion annually in inefficient and ineffective content marketing.

The web is full of the awesome content and to make your mark you have to deliver a quality content that your audience need.

There is no benefit of your content if it does not deliver the quality and information that you promise to your audience.

Content consultancy company Content Science found in their study, 65% Americans think the content they found on the web either is not complete or unreliable.  

I have listed the top reasons why content marketing fails and what you can do to save it.

Stick with me, and I will show you everything that you need to know to build your content marketing strategy and boost your marketing.

#1. Lack of Content Marketing Strategy

Have you ever played chess?

No.

It’s Okay, I haven’t played it myself.

A good chess player makes a perfect strategy to win a game against his competitor.

“The art of chess strategy is knowing how to formulate a plan for the chess game and arrange chess pieces to accomplish this plan.”

You can’t win a game until you know your competitor’s weakness, strength and their strategies.

Once you have it all, you can make a strategy to defeat him.

Content marketing is similar to a chess game.

Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs conducted a 2014 survey of B2B marketers, and found out that 60% successful marketers documented their content strategy. On the other hand only 11% unsuccessful marketed their content strategy.

Although, on B2C, only 27% successful marketers documented their content strategy, 50% marketers have their content strategy that was not documented it means no strategy at all.

You must have a strategy; even a bad one is better than no strategy.

With a bad strategy, at least, you can find that this is not a good strategy.

But with no strategy, you will only do work without knowing if it is right or wrong.

It is totally wastage of money and time and also can affect your brand impression.

So before we talk more about the content marketing strategy for your business, consider the reasons why people will like your content while the web is already full of fancy content.

#2. Provide Useful and Interesting Information

A successful marketer always brings something fresh to his audience.

Your content must provide a value to your audience and educate them in an entertaining way.

If your content is boring, less informative and can be easily found on the web, it will not get exposure and the result will make you cry.

If you want your audience care about your content, provide them that they are looking for.

You have to put yourself in your audience’s shoe.

Feel their pain.

Write a post and publish it to on your website is not a strategy.

You should write an effective and quality content that solve your audience’s specific problem.

Here are some questions you should ask yourself before writing a content:

Once you find answers to all these questions then you could be able to write a content that win your customer’s’ mind and heart.

Writing error free and well-researched blog is not enough. Your content marketing will not get speed until people love to read them and share it with others.

You should keep the balance of emotion, knowledge and education in your content.

#3. Your content marketing budget is low

Companies trying to grow faster than their competitors and they are not hesitating to spend more money.

In the other words, you will get what you will pay. If you want results with content marketing, you must have to spend enough money to stand out.

According to Kapost, An average, B2B companies with 250+ employees spend 55% of their annual marketing budget on content production and creation, excluding promotion investments.

See, companies are spending more money on content marketing because they know content marketing is the future of marketing.

61% consumers accepted that they trusted on the company that delivers custom content, and they are more likely to buy a product from that company.

So now the question arise if content marketing is expensive?

Yes, it is.

Companies spend, on average, 25% of their marketing budget on the content marketing.

Despite it expensive you get what you pay about.

Inbound marketing delivers 54% more leads into the marketing funnel than traditional outbound marketing.

Content marketing is more effective and easy than the traditional marketing.

Top companies who are posting 15 blog posts per month are generating 1,200 leads per month.

B2B companies with strategic content marketing produce 67% more leads than who don’t use content marketing.

Content marketing works it does not mean you throw your money with closed eyes.

Before invest your money in content marketing sit around with the content marketing team and discuss your content strategy.

Here are some points you should discuss with your content team:

Make a chart and see how you can get more ROI with less investment.

#4. You don’t promote your content

Do you know what is the biggest reason of content marketing failure?

It’s you; you are not promoting your content.

Let me tell you the mindset of many marketers. They think people will find their content on the web after searching keyword, read it and will convert. Their organic traffic will increase.

But the truth is they are living in the dream.

Content creation is only half battle rest other is the content promotion to win the game.

Your high-quality content is a total wastage, if it does not reach to your potential readers.

Now the question is how your audience will get your content?

There are few content promotion tactics that still works 100%.

Email Newsletter – In a study Curata, found that 21% of all business bloggers send their blog post directly to their subscribers, at least, every week. And 39% newbie bloggers do this weekly.

Email marketing is still the best and most effective way to send your content to the right consumers.

Marketers are predicted to spend 2.4% billion on email marketing by 2016.

Social Media – According to Linkedin Technology Marketing Community, marketers use top five effective social media platforms to deliver content and engage with the audience.

Social media is a great tool to find your loyal audience, who you can share your content.

You should carefully choose your social media platform according to your business type.

Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs found, B2B content marketers, use the social media platform in the following percentage:

Before you choose your social media platform, see which kind of user are engaging on that social media site.

Ask Influencers to share content – Search influencers in your niche who already have written or shared the posts as you have written.

How to find influencers in your niche?

Step 1. Go to the Twitter and search with your main keyword. Like I put the keyword “content marketing fails”.                                                                                                                                                                             

Step 2. Check out everyone’s Twitter profile to see if they are normal people or experts.

Step 3. Make a list of all of the influencers and visit their site or profile page to find their email.

Step 4. When you have enough emails of the influencers, then a pitch them and send them through their mail.

Step 5. Ask them politely that you have written more advanced content than they shared recently, if they can share your content too. Chances will be 10% influencers will not mind to share it with their audience.

You can apply the same strategy on other social media platform too.

Blog Comment – Blog comment still useful if you do it in a right way.

How to do blog comments that does not hurt your website ranking?

Find a post related to your business and read them carefully and understand what is the post about.

After reading the article carefully write a detailed blog comment and leave your blog post link in the website section with your real name.

Never use your business keyword instead of use your real name. So, it does look real not a fake comment like bot does.

Remember content creation is only half part other and to be successful you have to work on another part that is content promotion.

So, if you are not doing content promotion, start it right now before it’s too late.

#5. You Content is Terrible

Content should be like a healthy and tasty dish, that consumers easily digest and enjoy while they consume it on the web.

Content marketing simply means that you have to produce content, but it does not mean that you write anything that does not make sense.

Quality does matter especially in content because if your content is poorly written, no one will going to read that.

Many marketers only write about their brand and make their audience bore with it; it might be work for the brand, but it can impact negatively on your brand.

There are some points which shows that your content has no taste.

• Lack of understanding proper content – Almost every industry is facing this problem that which kind of content their consumers like.

To understand which kind of content your consumers like you have to understand your audience’s taste.

• You don’t hire a professional or experienced writer – I find this one is a major one. You want to do content marketing.

You hired a writer from fiverr on 5$ or any other similar freelance websites. Send them your keyword and detail and he writes a blog post.

You published that blog post on your website and your content marketing done, right?

Wrong! It is totally wrong.

If you are serious about your business and want to see result through content marketing.

Don’t hire an unprofessional writer for your company.

You will only waste your money and time, and the result will be zero because that person doesn’t understand your business.

• Boring Content –  I see most of the content on the web are very boring that I hardly can read 1 or 2 minutes.

If you want that people read your content then you must provide in-depth, data enriched and well written focused content.

Tell your story visually.

Research has shown that human brain catch visual content faster than written content and 93% of human communication is practically not verbal.

#6. You have a Challenging Niche

It’s true that some industry it not successful with content marketing in another word they are not made for content marketing.

There are some reasons why marketer finds themselves in trouble with boring industry.

• Industries where people usually don’t come online.
• Industries that are people don’t know like RFID for cylinder tracking. B2B industries usually be boring.
• A business that are boring like “liquid gas monitoring” is not sexy like “get your ex back in 24 hours”.

If you are in the challenging niche, then there is no shortcut that you get instant success in your content marketing.

But this is not an excuse. Because 93% of B2B marketers are using content marketing.  

There are key points you should focus while creating content for a boring niche.

• Be original. No matter how boring your product and industry are, you must be unique and original.
• Make your product real to your buyers. Don’t make fake promises.
• Tell your story in the way that your consumers easily understand and believe.
• Talk about users not only about the product. They should be in center and middle of your content.
• Create an emotional connection with your audience through your content.

You must find the way, which way is your audience consuming content?

Might be you write a content and your potential buyers are busy, so they would prefer to listen or watch that content.

Do a research and collect all the data that shows how busy your audience are and which kind of content they like to see.

#7. You are against a strong competitor

Every business has competition. If your business has no competition means that you are not much successful.

If you have a strong competitor, and you want to beat him in his game, then you have to work hard.

I mean really, really and really hard work.

How you can compete with strong competitors who are producing a huge amount of content?

I have some advice for you.

Keep consistently content production – Don’t be afraid if you have a strong competitor keep producing quality content.

Make a strong community – Be active on social media platforms and forums where your target audience engage. Several big companies directly don’t participate in the forums. See if you can find the way to solve their problem they will be your loyal audience.

Be a James Bond – I am not saying that you get gun and gadgets. I simply mean to say, investigate your competitors’ marketing strategy.

Which kinds of content they are missing and how you can do better than them.

Keep in mind don’t copy their strategy, be original and unique.

Once you find the hole in their content marketing, uses that opportunities to make your content strong.

#8. You are Impatience

Content marketing is not like a paid marketing, like Google Adwords that bring instant results.

Content marketing takes the time to show results.

Don’t assume that your success with your content in a few weeks or a month.

You should give some time to your content to gain popularity on the web, get some organic traffic.

Content is not a short race; it is like a marathon.

You should keep providing quality content at constant basis only if you are serious about content marketing

Content marketing is not for them who are impatience. You wanna play this game you have to wait and work on your strategy. Otherwise, you will fail and get nothing.

Make your readers node yes with your content.

According to a Harvard Business Review, 56% of decisions are made before a customer ever talk to a supplier, and Gartner Research forecast that by 2020, customers will manage their 85% relationship with an organization’s interacting with the human.

So, if you are really serious about your business, then you must go with content marketing.

#9. You are not using SEO

To be a successful online you should not go alone with content marketing.  If you mix it up with SEO, your content marketing result will be amazing.

Content marketing would be hard to be successful without a proper SEO.

If you are doing it wrong, don’t expect any positive results.

SEO is more technical than the content marketing.

Let’s see it another way SEO makes demand and content marketing fulfill those demands.

There will be no SEO if there will be no content.

Content marketing and SEO is like a brothers from a single mother. If you use them in a right way, you can get an amazing results.

Beware of blackhat SEO techniques, strategies have been changed that worked fine on back days.

You can easily find SEO agencies that provide tons of backlink at a low cost. If you are using that kind of cheap SEO services, stop it immediately.

I would suggest don’t fall for them because it hurt your website’s ranking and the chances your site to be penalized with Google.

The best way to build links naturally is to publish killer content and let it earn links itself. If your content is valuable and people like it, you can get some serious links from high-quality sites.

If you want to be a good content marketer you have to be a good SEO and vise versa.

#10. Search Engine does not love your content

When you are producing content, think about search engine too. Because if you want to be successful with content marketing, you should not forget to search engine.

Most of the bloggers face this problem to produce a content that optimized for the search engine.

People usually don’t understand the power of SEO that why they got confuse with it.

According to Copyblogger, SEO is most misunderstood topic online.

If you use SEO in right way throughout your content it will push your content to the top side on the search engine results, and your organic traffic will also increase.

Impression Marketing found that many marketers SEOs invest 55% of their time in content marketing.

Neil Patel has increased his blog traffic by 206% using expert SEO strategies that could work for you too, if you do it right.

Here are some tips to consider when you publish your content:

• Mix keyword in your content in a natural way.
• Use headings like (H1 and H2). Your content should have at least one H1.
• Don’t just use auto generated URL. Your post’s URL should have at least one keyword.
• Link your other post’s URLs with relevant keyword.
• Create content with useful resources.

Final Thoughts

There are several reasons that could cause of content marketing failure.

Once you find the right reason, why your content marketing fails, you can take a right step to save it.

If you want your business stand out of from the crowd, you have to create a killer content.

Demand Metric infographic shows, content marketing generates three times more leads than traditional marketing, but it costs 62% less.

Content marketing companies create a solid content marketing strategy to make it successful.

If you are working alone as a content marketer, then you should keep in mind the above tips. These tips accelerate your content marketing efforts. I would like to know which reasons do you think you have?