You think, you write, you refine; you create a masterpiece. You release it
into the wild, thinking it’s going to spread like wildfire because it’s the
best thing you’ve ever written. And… nothing. Sujan Patel walks through five
reasons why your strategy is failing and what you can do about it
Summary transcript
Today, we’re going to talk about why content marketing isn’t working. This is
honestly the most common question I get asked when I talk to people, and this
is probably happening to most people. And why isn’t content marketing working?
1. You’re probably not doing content marketing
You’re probably just writing content, what does that mean? Yeah, you can
produce content, but that’s just writing content, that might be blogging you
might be doing you might be creating great stuff, but you’re not marketing it.
So market the content. What does that mean? Go out there and promote it.
My general rule of thumb is that I can have at least five ways to promote
my content before I even write the content — before I decide I want to pursue
this piece of content.
2. You probably don’t know who you’re talking to
You probably are not writing the right content for your customers, or your
target customers.
Let’s just put this way; if I knew all my customers love the hot dogs, I would
throw hot dogs everywhere in this video, right? I mean, there would be just me
hot dogs everywhere. I don’t know if my audience loves hot dogs, maybe they
like emojis, there’d be emojis everywhere, right?
Figure out who your audience, what they are, who they are, what they like,
what they don’t like.
3. You’re not collecting emails
You’re getting the page view but you’re not going beyond that, right?* You’re
not getting past that awareness stage.*
Get into the consideration stage, what does that mean? Well, get their
freaking email address, first of all, create a content upgrade, create a PDF
version of whatever content you created, create more meaty content, meaning
make it look beautiful, right?
That is the difference between somebody quickly viewing your stuff, that’s the
difference between Elite Daily, BuzzFeed, and HubSpot.
At HubSpot, you go there to learn you go to the blog because you want to be
educated on something and that’s that’s where you want to get people to.
4. Content Upgrades
Use tools like SumoMe, or Optinmonster — SumoMe Welcome Mat is an easy to
use thing, in fact like I’ve seen so many people just set up out of the box
and the initial text says “Double your traffic”, or something of that nature,
and it works.
You should have a to have an email opt-in rate around two to five percent.
Mines around four to five because I have a welcome mat, I have a sidebar that
says ‘sign up’ I have content upgrades, meaning call to actions that everyone
in my recent blog post. And then I have an interstitial that pops up when you
try to leave — an exit intent.
All of those things combined work around four and five percent, and I’m always
tinkering one time I got it all the way up to six percent using two things,
but it didn’t last too long.
Anyways, focus on that now the other thing I want to talk about is to remember
when you’re creating content, and probably you’re creating the wrong content
for the wrong person, and you’re not doing enough to promote it.
But let’s let’s brush that aside for a second.
5. You might be creating too much content
Why is too much content bad? I’ll tell you firsthand; I create six articles a
week, and I can tell you how hard it is to get the word out and have enough
time to promote content to the market, to do the marketing part of content
marketing for six articles.
It’s frankly impossible unless I have a team of three to five people to help
me get the word out, or have a huge budget. So, instead of writing a lot of
content, write a lot less content.
So, write less, write more — again, make sure it’s well designed, and it’s
educational. Get people’s email addresses, and remember: the worst thing you
can do is create a piece of content and do nothing else.
Eighty percent of your time should be focused on promoting the content,
the twenty percent, yes, only twenty percent, of your time should be creating
it.
That means if you’re spending a hundred percent of your time creating content,
and that’s all you’re doing, well add in a lot more time to what to content
marketing.
