We live in the age of tech-savvy consumers who have access to a plethora of resources to make well-informed purchasing decisions.
In this digital age, content marketing has become the key to success. It is an inevitable part of digital marketing that you need to develop in order to convert your target audience into loyal customers.
And to begin building this relationship, you will need a well-thought-out strategy that is scalable and aligns with your company’s objectives, consumer expectations, and current content marketing trends.
Signs That Your Digital Content Marketing Strategy Is Out of Date
To stay competitive and thrive in the ever-changing marketplace, it takes more than just attempting a shot at content marketing.
You must ensure that your company consistently implements fresh, trending, and effective digital content marketing strategies to reach the target market.
Additionally, you must also fine-tune these strategies to maintain your competitive advantage, gain new customers, and push your buyers to the end of the funnel.
But how do you know if your content marketing strategy is out of date? Some indicators alert you that your strategy is not performing as well as it should. Let’s take a look at these signs.
You Have Prioritized Quantity Over Quality
The quality of the content created is far more critical than the quantity. Therefore, creating content in any format is futile before analyzing your target audience’s interests and pain points.
Instead of focusing on producing more and more content within a specific time frame, consider having high-quality content. Make an effort to research topics that are sure to resonate with your audience.
Even the search engine algorithms suggest that only actual value-holding content will be visible on top. Therefore, high-quality pieces with depth rather than superficial information are sure to engage your audience and rank you higher on search engines.
Therefore, it only makes sense to create high-quality content that answers the audience’s questions. Additionally, such content will be relevant and engaging many months or even a year from now.
Talk about saving time and effort and still getting ROI!
You Are Not Able to Quantify Your Business Growth
While you may believe that content marketing is inherently qualitative rather than quantitative, keeping track of your metrics is critical. If your website traffic is not resulting in measurable business growth, you are doing something wrong.
This is where data analytics must sweep in to help.
The key to tracking your progress is to have KPIs that monitor average time spent on pages, the number of pages viewed, reach on social media, quality inbound links, and bounce rates.
Proper data analysis and timely action will help you keep your content marketing strategy up to date. And your successful content marketing strategy will bring in website traffic, audience engagement, lead generation, conversion, and the like.
You Are Not Ready to Change Your Content Marketing Budget
To understand this stance better, let’s look at some statistics by SEMRush:
- Businesses that spend 10% to 70% of their total marketing budget on content marketing are 73% more likely to succeed.
- 53% of the companies that were unsuccessful at their content marketing efforts in 2021 spent less than 5% of their overall marketing budget on content.
Now, what do these statistics indicate?
While content marketing is frequently regarded as a free mode of marketing to generate traffic, it is, in fact, similar to any other aspect of a business. So to say, you must invest money to make money.
Every modern marketer recognizes the significance of allocating a huge budget for digital content marketing. Most of them, however, are unaware that their budget has remained relatively constant over the last few years.
There may be a problem that their content marketing strategy is stagnant in terms of updates and progress. To avoid making this mistake, you should experiment with different content marketing strategies on a small scale to see what delivers the best results.
If a format or a strategy is working well, work on expanding that rather than putting the money, time, and resources into multiple tactics. Fine-tuning your content marketing budget as per data is the only way to achieve long-term ROI.
Lower Website Traffic
Are you using your content to educate your target audience and establish your domain authority in the industry?
Despite your best efforts, is your website traffic not increasing and converting?
Are your existing subscribers also dropping you?
Then it is time for you to update your digital content marketing strategy.
It is difficult to call a digital content marketing campaign a success if it does not result in a long-term increase in website traffic. However, consistently low traffic on your website could be caused by a variety of content marketing-related factors.
But, to develop a marketing strategy that benefits both you and your client, you must first identify the causes of your leads not converting and your current audience leaving.
Google Analytics will tell you if your overall website traffic is growing, but you should also consider the average time your audience spends on each page, the total number of pages viewed per user, and the bounce rate.
If your overall website traffic increases but engagement does not, this indicates that your promotion strategy is effective, but the content itself requires revision.
Lack of Promotion and Distribution of Content
Did you think creating content was enough? No, even creating relevant content in diverse formats for various social media platforms is not enough. Why?
Because if you are not devoted to your content’s promotion and distribution, you will never achieve great results with digital content marketing. Promotion, like content creation, is a perpetually ongoing process with no end date.
Some content marketers will write a new blog post, post it and share it on Twitter with all of the relevant keywords and hashtags, wish for engagement, and then forget about it.
Even if you create the best, most engaging content in the world, this sloppy approach to promotion needs to be updated in order for you to achieve success.
Tips to Create Excellent and Scalable Content Marketing Strategy
A digital content marketing strategy must be ready for timely tweaks as per the trends. It should also have scope for scalability and long-term sustainability.
The tips below will aid you in creating content that can optimize your content marketing strategy:
Handle the Pain Points of Your Target Audience Through Content
What is the ultimate goal of a content marketing strategy?
To attract the target audience, engage them, and convert them into paying customers.
How can you accomplish this?
By positioning your service or product as a viable solution to your audience’s problems.
Once you have defined their issue, you can look for relevant keywords or search terms that people use to find solutions and base your content on them.
Moreover, it is also important that you know where your audience is looking for answers and solutions. Once you have determined that, you can position your content in places so it is easily visible to your audience.
Rely on Analytics Before Making Changes or Decisions
Analytics are the lifeblood of any strategy or campaign. How would you know if something is giving you results or if it is worth continuing? The answer is analytics.
You can get a detailed picture of the results, such as engagement rate, conversions, footfalls, and whatnot.
Analytics come in use when you need to prepare performance reports, analyze what to stick with, gauge how well experimental content is doing, and when you need to evolve your running strategies. This will ensure that you maintain the ROI rate, if not increase it.
Create Relevant Content with the Latest Trends
The most fascinating yet the most challenging element that comes with content marketing is- evolving with and adapting to the trends. And not to mention that trends change overnight.
Something that is viral today might not be relevant the next day. Therefore, content marketers must especially pay attention to the latest trends and what their audience is connecting with.
Not just content, even the content marketing formats are evolving. These days, people want to engage with your content in the ways they like.
You might have an audience that enjoys informative blog posts, but there will also be a significant chunk that would prefer podcasts over reading. Therefore, you cannot just stick to one format and keep it going forever.
Experiment with the latest technologies that Gen Z loves- Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and so on. Use data analytics (as we discussed above) to find what format your target audience would love to engage with.
You can get a detailed picture of the results, such as engagement rate, conversions, footfalls, and whatnot.
Analytics come in use when you need to prepare performance reports, analyze what to stick with, gauge how well experimental content is doing, and when you need to evolve your running strategies. This will ensure that you maintain the ROI rate, if not increase it.
Your goal should be to introduce new trends and methods for connecting with your target audience via the platforms they prefer.
This hyper-personalized approach will help you create a deep and lasting connection with your audience. What’s more? It will also ensure that they trust your brand and stay loyal.
What are the Factors of a Successful Content Marketing Strategy? What Leads to its Failure?
A successful digital content marketing strategy must be scalable. Apart from that, below are a few factors that ensure that your content strategy is a sure shot of success:
- Well-researched and well-defined target audience
- SMART Goals
- Clearly defined and understood brand USP
- Precise metrics for analytics and mapping growth
However, if you have all the factors above in your content marketing strategy and you are yet to taste success, you might want to know why your content strategy may not be as effective.
- Poorly planned content creation, publishing, and distribution strategy
- Content not relevant to the current trends or the inclination of your target audience
- Not creating content at regular intervals (this makes the engagement difficult)
- Poorly allocated content marketing budget
- Not focusing enough on UGC- User-Generated Content
- Not using a concrete content planning, monitoring, and management system
If you have just started with a content marketing strategy that you are confident in, you should give it some time to perform before deciding if it is fruitful.
And how do you know if it is bringing results?
Data analytics will tell you. Check the metrics to know the increase in website footfalls, conversions, engagement rate, productive content formats, and so on.
Moreover, getting customer feedback and creating focus groups can also help you analyze how well your content marketing strategy is doing and where is the scope for improvement.
How Often Should a Digital Content Marketing Strategy be Updated?
While a content marketing strategy is usually crafted for a span of 12 to 18 months, it is imperative that you review the metrics and tweak the strategy regularly.
This will help you stay on top of your strategy and remain aligned with your business goals. Moreover, you will also be able to capitalize on emerging opportunities before everyone else in your industry.
Get an Extensively Planned, Result-Oriented Content Marketing Strategy with ODL
Digital content marketing rarely works on the very first try. So, don’t be alarmed or panicky if your content marketing efforts are not yielding the desired results. It might take months to gain traction.
But data and numbers will inform you of the tiniest progress, so you will know which strategies to stick to.
Even if your current campaigns and strategies are not working, there is no harm in consulting an expert content marketing agency. What matters is that you keep innovating and experimenting.
And who better than One Digital Land to emphasize that the long-term benefits and commitment to publishing consistent and high-quality content are well worth the wait!
But, you do not need to wait anymore for a streamlined and well-planned digital content marketing strategy!
Want to know how? Find us here.