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Video transcript:
If you're not getting the results you were hoping for from your content marketing strategy, you're going to want to pay careful attention here because content marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies available to you today.
But it also comes with some challenges as well as a set of unspoken rules that few people know about and will help explain the real reasons why your content just isn't working. So let me explain why.
If you've ever read a blog post or listened to a podcast or watched a video on content marketing, then I'm sure you've come across the age-old advice to just publish high quality content on a consistent basis. This is practically content marketing gospel at this point. Now, by nature most people understand the high quality part, even if quality is a little bit subjective and what's good for one may not be good for another market, industry, niche or any business.
Now, we can all appreciate that higher quality content is probably going to do better than lower quality content. But what seems to be up for debate and where the biggest objections lie is in the consistency part. Or in other words, just how much content do you really need to create in order to get traction? Well, the truth is in today's hyper competitive market, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but more is probably better.
This means if your content production strategy is currently to put out say one video a month, try to make that one or two videos a week. If you're sending out a weekly email newsletter to your list, try three times a week. And if you're putting out say, Instagram content daily, well, could you do twice a day or three times a day?
You see, there’s a lot of competitive out there. So the key is to do your best and to do it as often as you can without going crazy in the process. That's the game.
Another one of the reasons why most content simply fails to work is that it's selfish content. Selfish content really just means creating the kind of content that you want to create rather than the kind of content your market wants you to create.
Yes, it is important to create content that you enjoy and you find interesting and entertaining. Otherwise it'll come off as dry or bland or boring or you'll just quit altogether. But this has to be weighed against the customer's needs because it's the market that decides on the value and on the true worth of the content you're creating. And we know the market is always right.
There are two reasons though that you really want to avoid selfish content. The first of which is that it completely misses the mark in even getting found or even getting discovered in the first place. Because if nobody's looking for it and nobody really wants it, nobody's going to see it.
The second point is that if they do find it, well, it'll miss the mark in terms of delivery because it's not created with the customer, with the prospect, with the audience in mind. It fails to answer the question, what's in it for me?
The solution to all of this is fortunately really easy, and it really just comes down to asking yourself at every stage of the content creation process, is this something my customer would actually want to see or read or hear or watch or consume?
Now, this was a trap I fell into very early in my career. I was seduced by the appeal of trying to do really cool things and share them and then build my business that way. Turns out taking pictures of your food for Instagram or posting endless vacation pics on Facebook or vlogging about your daily life and posting that on YouTube aren't actually a great way to build your business. And in fact, they may actually hurt it, especially if this is not the kind of content that your audience signed up for in the first place.
You see, one of the hardest pills for me to swallow back then was how little people truly cared about me. That sounds horribly pessimistic, but it's actually quite freeing and quite liberating because it allowed my content to be less about me and my story and my needs and my desire to share, and more about my market and their needs and their problems and their pains and things that I could actually help them with.
The question starts to become, what could you create that would help them? What would they want to see or hear or watch? What could you create that would add real genuine value to their lives?
When you start creating content with this mindset, magic happens. Probably unsurprising that when you make this shift, your business will grow, your audience starts to grow, and your content starts to resonate and get far better engagement and reactions with your market because it’s no longer about you, it’s about them.
The next reason that your content may be failing to really hit the mark is that it's going too broad and failing to really focus and get targeted and niched down on the specific problem and the specific market that you're trying to address.
You see, when you try to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one. Going too broad forces you to naturally water down your message to be more inclusive. This in turn makes it more bland, more boring, and more ignorable.
It also forces you to rely and to create gross generalizations, which again, simply aren't relevant or relatable to the vast majority of people. They've heard it all before, they've seen it all before, and they're tired of it.
Mass marketing and brand advertising might work for billion-dollar corporations with massive multi-million-dollar budgets that can afford to spend on this type of marketing. But for the vast majority, this is a recipe for disaster.
There's another benefit as well in really narrowing down and really focusing and being concentrated and strategic with your content, and that is taking advantage of something called the long tail. In the context of content marketing, the long tail are simply those ideas or topics or keywords that are a lot more targeted and a lot more specific, allowing you to capture those smaller pockets of the audience that are searching for those exact things.
For example, a broad topic I could create could be something like marketing. I could narrow this down a little bit more by saying digital marketing. I could narrow this down even more and really take advantage of the long tail by saying digital marketing strategies for local businesses. We can even take it one step further and say digital marketing strategies for local home improvement service businesses.
You see, when you get more specific and more focused like that, it allows you to really dial in on the exact pains and problems and needs and desires of that target market rather than having to go massively broad and talk about marketing in general, which is huge and would probably lead to a 300 hour long video.
Now, before we move on, if you want to try out some of these content marketing strategies check out the first link in the description where I give away all my marketing training for free to get you started.
Alright, the next reason your content is failing to get the results you desire is because you're simply not promoting it enough. Build it and they will come is garbage advice. The better advice is to build it and then tell everyone you know and tell them again and again because people are busy and they got a lot of stuff going on.
The world is full of great products and great services and great businesses that die a slow and painful death because they fail to understand that having a great business isn't enough.
You also need great marketing. I'd even go so far as to say if you created something that actually helps people and really provides value, by not doing marketing, you're actually providing them a huge disservice because you have a solution to a problem that they're going through and you're not sharing it with them.
This is why it's your duty, your obligation to promote your content and promote your business so you can help more people. Spread your message, make a bigger impact, and get paid very well along the way. So create, then promote, then get back to creating again and then promote even more.
This next mistake was a trap I also fell into early in my content career and that was creating content just for content's sake. Basically, you're creating content and doing content marketing just because someone said you need to do content marketing.
What this ends up looking like is cranking out blog posts, recording podcasts, maybe thinking about starting a YouTube channel but having no idea what you're going to talk about or why you're even doing it in the first place.
This, naturally is a giant waste of time and it leads to unfocused and random acts of content. Creating, just throwing it out there, hoping it works. Probably unsurprisingly, hope is a terrible marketing strategy.
In order for content to work, it needs to be strategic. Ask yourself, why are you making this? What's the goal? How will you measure whether this piece of content was successful or not? And the best way to make sure you've got all of this dialed in is to make sure your content is aligned. So on that topic, the next mistake and the next reason your content may not be working is that your content isn't aligned.
So let me explain what that means. Content alignment is really just fancy talk for doing the right things in the right place for the right people. Your market is the right people. Your message is the right things and the media is the right place.
So let's quickly break down each one of these now because this stuff's important. Every single successful content marketing strategy starts with an almost maniacal focus on the ideal target market that you're trying to serve.
This is because getting a million people to pay attention to your content really doesn't matter if they're not the right people and are unlikely to buy your services. And yet I see this every single day.
Business owners and entrepreneurs failing to properly identify and then locate their ideal target market and then wondering why their content just isn't striking a chord, isn't resonating, isn't increasing engagement, isn't resulting in sales.
This is why step one is always to really clearly identify your ideal target market. Their demographic details like age, gender, income, occupation, their geographic details like what city, state or country they live in, and their psychographic details like their attitudes and their values and their interests and their beliefs.
Alright, let's move on to the next one which is your message. Once you've got your ideal target market identified, well it's time to start peeling back the layers and identifying what I call their miracles and their miseries. Their miracles being their dreams, their goals and their desires, their aspirations and their miseries being their pains and their problems and their fears and their frustrations.
Now of course the devil's in the details but if you're just getting started, really just going through this exercise and identifying what their main pains and their main problems are will already put you ahead of 99% of your competition who is failing to do this crucial step. Once you have these answers it's time to move on to the next point which is media.
It's here in the media section of this video that I want to address perhaps one of the biggest myths that I'm seeing right now in the marketing world and that is this myth that you need to be everywhere and do everything.
By that I mean creating tens if not hundreds if not thousands of pieces of content every single day and being on every single different social media platform, posting and managing and having conversations and really just exhausting yourself. Not only is this a completely unrealistic and overwhelming strategy for the vast majority of businesses out there, it's also incredibly ineffective.
This is because once you've identified your ideal target market and found where they're present and active online, well you'll naturally come to the conclusion that they're not everywhere and they're not doing everything. Rather they're focused on one, two, maybe three different channels and spend the vast majority of their time there. So go where they are and ignore everything else.
This is going to save you a ton of time, a ton of money, and a ton of energy and really save yourself the frustration of wondering why your content isn't working. Nobody ever made a plan to create marketing that nobody sees, nobody likes, and loses you a ton of money in the process. Those things are what happen when you don't have a plan.
Thanks for watching and cant wait to see you in one of the next business marketing videos that should show up right about now.