Why Your Content Marketing Isn’t Working

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? 12jk8erynmqeyddeqrrw8za.

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. You might be blogging, 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 it this way; if I knew all my customers loved 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 is, what they are, who they are, what they like, and what they don’t like.

3. You’re Not Collecting Emails

You’re getting the page views, 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 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, I’ve seen so many people just set it up out of the box, and the initial text says “Double your traffic,” or something of that nature, and it works.

You should have an email opt-in rate around two to five percent. Mine's around four to five because I have a welcome mat, I have a sidebar that says ‘sign up,’ I have content upgrades, meaning calls to action 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 to 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 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.