Your content marketing may fail for several reasons, but the solution isn’t putting on the brakes. It’s still one of the best digital tools out there for educating your leads and engaging them with your brand. Chances are, the mistakes you’re making involve either your emails or your search engine optimization (SEO). Read on to learn about which ones are common, and how to fix them.
Your Emails Aren’t Engaging
Subject lines have been a source of debate at least since email automation began. That makes sense, considering they’re the first part of your messages that anyone will ever see. But if yours are underperforming, it could be because of the following.
- They aren’t eye-catching. In order to stand out, try creating a sense of urgency, touching on a pain point in your lead’s market, or asking a question.
- They’re too long or too short. Too many words can become distracting, but too few may make your subjects easier to overlook. Generally speaking, six (6) words is ideal.
- They include all caps, salesy lingo, or special characters. If these don’t already get your messages flagged as spam by email providers, they’ll at least make them look like spam or impersonal to your leads. One of the quickest ways your content marketing may fail is if it’s never seen. Treat subject lines like you’re writing to your coworkers.
- They don’t reflect the message body. This functions much like clickbait, where it may generate some initial interest, but ultimately make your leads feel misled to the point that they disengage. It also goes against CAN-SPAM law.
- They completely summarize the message body. If you tell your leads everything that’s in your emails, they don’t have any impetus to open them. As one contributor notes, use subject lines that make leads think, “Tell me more.”
Taken altogether, it’s the difference between using a subject line like “Most B2B sales rely on [x],” versus “Have your B2B reps seen this?”
Your SEO Is Underperforming
Another reason your content marketing may fail is when it involves poor SEO. While email drives traffic to your website directly, SEO is important for organic traffic — visitors who search for a specific term that relates to your business (or your business itself) and find your website as a result. If you can rank well for search engines, the more likely your information will display at the top.
Note: This is not the same as pay-per-click (PPC), which you can read more about here.
If you don’t see your company popping up on the first page of a search, it could be due to the following.
- You aren’t using enough keywords or keyword phrases. These are the terms and phrases you know are important to your audience, and that they’ll be searching for. Using keywords every 200 words or so within your content on a given page will help them register when a search engine crawls your website. Try to keep their frequency natural within your content, and avoid overuse: the latter makes your content sound off-putting, and can give search engines the impression that you aren’t genuine (known as keyword stuffing).
- You’re not utilizing your metadata. Metadata is what you see when a search result displays: the title of the page (meta title), and a brief excerpt from it (meta description). Not including your keywords or keyword phrases in your metadata means that the individual page you’re trying to rank may not perform as well compared to others.
- Your website is slow to load. How quick is quick enough for a website to rank well for load speeds? Ideally, one to two seconds. Anything over three can begin to lower your ranking. There are plenty of free website speed testing tools available to see how yours stacks up, and recommendations for how to optimize — or you can ask us for a website audit.
These are just a handful of the reasons why your content marketing may fail. Thankfully, they’re all easy to correct. The question is, do you want to make these corrections yourself, or would you like to have marketing professionals guide you through those changes? If it’s the latter, we’d love to hear from you. Click the link below to schedule time for a free discussion.
