Top 5 Reasons Your Content Marketing Campaign Failed

From time to time, I’m asked to troubleshoot why someone’s content marketing campaign hasn’t been as successful as expected. Almost always, the cause of the problem falls within the scope of one of the following reasons. Here, in reverse order, are my top five reasons content marketing campaigns fail:

#5. You are not content marketing:

Content marketing is the marketing of a business to achieve one or more objectives of that business. If achieving your business goal is not the reason for producing your content, you are writing a blog. That important distinction is not always understood.

Many content creators don’t understand the role content marketing plays in moving their prospects through their sales funnel. Different types of content are needed for each stage, i.e. for suspects, prospects, and retaining and reselling existing customers. If you’re not producing content that supports each stage of the sales process, you’re not doing content marketing.

#4. There is no market for your product or service:

It never ceases to amaze me how many businesses fail because the founders did not do adequate research to establish if there was a market for their business or if their product or service met that need.

You can have a technically excellent product, but it will fail if no one wants to buy it. I once worked for a company that had such a product. Every prospect the sales force brought to them said it was a great idea, but they didn’t buy it. It was a solution in search of a problem. Then you have the other side of the coin: there is a market, but your product or service does not satisfy it. There is a problem, but you don’t have the solution.

No matter how good your content marketing is, your campaign will fail in its goal of acquiring new customers if:

• There is no market for your product or service, or

• If your product does not solve the customer’s problem.

#3. You are posting in the wrong place:

You need to make sure that your content reaches your target audience. You need to know:

• Who is your target audience. That includes demographic information such as their age, gender, socioeconomic group, whether they are likely to be married, and whether they have a family;

• where they currently go for information; and

• How they prefer to consume data.

Let’s consider a couple of examples:

Example 1 – You have a company that supports WordPress websites globally. Your target audience is likely to be business owners who already have or intend to have a website on the WordPress platform. They are likely to be in the 24-54 age group, are probably married, and probably have a family. They are entrepreneurs, not software engineers.

You’ll find them on Linked In, and they probably have a personal and business presence on Facebook as well. They are also very likely to use mobile computing devices, which is their preferred device for consuming data.

You should post your content to the places these people go to get answers to their WordPress problems, like YouTube, podcasts (think iTunes, Sticker, Podcast Republic, and Zune, to name just a few). own program or make guest appearances in other programs, SlideShare, writing articles (think long SlideShare documents, not just article directories), blogs, and forums for WordPress users.

Example 2: provides an online tuition course in mathematics. Your target audience is likely to be school-age children and their parents. They will have a personal presence on Facebook and will probably also use one or more of the other popular social networking sites like WhatsApp and Line. They probably have a Gmail account and also use YouTube.

The nature of their service lends itself to visual media, which is how this group prefers to consume data. Your target audience will use sites like Udemy and You Tube to find content.

The preferences of your target audience will determine where you need to post your content and will determine the medium you use to deliver your content. If your target audience prefers to consume visual content, text-based content will not appeal to them and they will be much less likely to visit text-based content sites.

If your target audience prefers to consume data at a time and place that is most convenient for them—in other words, they want to consume content on demand—consider audio podcasting. However, you should only do this if your content lends itself to the spoken word.

Should you publish your content on your own website?

The answer depends on how long you’ve been in business and what reputation you already enjoy. In any case, the Pareto principle or the 80:20 rule will apply. Whether your business is a start-up or a young business, 80% of your content should be published outside of your website. As your business becomes established and your reputation grows, that ratio may reverse.

Not only do you need to post your content to the places your audiences go for information, but you need to make sure it catches their attention. That means consistently promoting your content on social networking sites like Facebook, Google+, Linked In, and You Tube, as well as Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and other similar sites. Consider issuing a press release and linking to the content in blog posts and comments, and on forums. If you have an email list, let your list know about the content you’ve created and ask them to share it with others.

You should expect to spend at least as much time promoting your content as you did creating it. Not all marketers do this, which is why many content marketing campaigns fail.

#2. His campaign is too short:

While there are people who claim great success with a short campaign, these lucky few are the exception. For most of us, content marketing is a medium to long-term exercise that plays different roles at different stages of our sales funnel. Put another way, you need to create content that is appropriate and supports each stage of the buying process.

Let’s say, for example, that you have a business selling video cameras and accessories. You will need to create content that explains the different types of cameras available, their prices, the uses they are best suited for, and the amount of knowledge or experience the user will need to operate the device. This type of content is aimed at the person browsing your online store looking to see what’s available.

You can then segment your content to cover different sections of your potential audience, such as those looking for a camera for taking family and vacation videos, hobbyists, and high-end professional and hobbyist users. Content that compares the features, benefits and drawbacks, pros and cons if you will, of each product in the market segment will help the potential customer make a short list of suitable products. The person browsing your site is now a prospect.

The next set of content will focus on a specific product and the benefits of buying it from you. This type of content will help convert the prospect into a customer.

The final set of content will help your customer get the most out of their purchase and increase sales of product add-ons and accessories.

If you’re not creating content for each stage of the buying and post-sales support process, your content marketing campaign may not be as successful as you hoped.

#1. Poor quality content:

Poor quality content is the main reason why many content marketing campaigns fail. The term “shoddy” covers a multitude of sins.

Earlier in this article I said that your content should be created with the goal of achieving a business goal. That’s true, but your content marketing must not only do that, it must solve a problem that your target audience has. At the very least, it should give them some use and value. Unfortunately, much of the content that is created is little more than a thinly veiled sales pitch.

It goes without saying that your content should be grammatically correct and free of misspellings. It must also be well written and follow a logical sequence. If you’re writing an article, your goal is to hold your reader’s interest long enough for them to reach your resource box. This is where you need to give the reader a good reason to click the link to your website from where you will make the sale.

Similar with the video. You want to hold the viewer’s attention until they see the call to action, which is usually clicking a link in the description.

Poor quality is a description that can also be applied to content that is too short or too general to be helpful to the person consuming it. Your content should be long enough to impart all the information you need to give in enough detail, but short enough to ensure it holds their interest.

There is another definition of low-quality content that is often overlooked by content marketers, that is, if they are aware of it. If your content fails to engage with your audience, you have failed to achieve one of your business goals. Most marketers measure the success of their content by how many views it has received, how many likes it has, or a combination of both. A piece of content may have been viewed many times and received a large number of likes, but no one has engaged with it. They didn’t comment on it, share it with their own audience, tweet about it, or include it on Reddit or StumbleUpon.

For your content marketing to be successful, your audience must engage with your content.

Food to go:

As marketers, I think we can take away the following points:

#1. There must be a viable market for your product or service;

#2. Your content should help you achieve a business goal;

#3. Your content should be posted where your audience is likely to find it, and you should promote your content;

#4. Your content marketing campaign should support all stages of the sales process, as well as providing post-sales support, and

#5. You must create good quality content that encourages audience participation.

Your content marketing campaign is likely to succeed if you apply these five lessons.