A common complaint about content marketing campaigns is that people don’t see it making an impact for their business. But before you blame the marketing genre, have you stopped to evaluate the quality of the content you’re generating?
Don’t shoot the messenger! If what you’re pushing out doesn’t set you apart from the crowd, then it shouldn’t come as a surprise you’re failing to get views or generate engagement.
So how can you fix it? Ask yourself, “Why should my customers care? About this article? About this blog? About this video?”
When you focus your thinking on being customer centric, it becomes much easier to find your content marketing sweet spot. To keep your content unique, consider:
- Is your focus niche enough?
- Are you using the right channels to reach your audience?
- Saturation — Don’t be a “me too.” For example, don’t start a podcast if all the other seed companies are doing podcasts.
Once you’ve considered this, then you can dive a little deeper and sharpen your understanding of what’s the buzz in your audience’s industry.
It is not just about staying in the loop or on top of industry trends — you should truly understand the context or bigger picture and how it impacts your audience.
Meaningful Content
Your content needs to be meaningful to create a connection.
The adjective “meaningful” can often be subjective from one person to another. The key to understanding what is meaningful to your audience is taking the time to talk with others and investing the resources to actually find out. To accomplish this, you might want to consider setting up alerts to help you follow trending topics, subscribe to relevant influencers’ and competitors’ email lists, and have regular conversations between your sales and marketing communications teams.
Your sales people are the front-line. They are the first to hear both the good reports and the bad reports from your customers.
It takes a lot of work to earn our audience’s attention, so let’s make sure that once we have it, we keep it.