Content Not Engaging Your Audience Content Not Engaging Your Audience

It can be super disheartening when you take hours upon hours crafting a blog post, only for it to go almost unnoticed on the web. But with 27 million (yep, you heard us right – million) pieces of new content being shared across the internet every day, it’s pretty hard to stand out from the crowd.

You’ve probably been told time and time again that content is king. We’re guessing you’re tired of hearing it after your content seems to have failed in getting you a return on your investment, whether that was time or money.

But content marketing is effective… when it’s done right. So to help you figure out where you’re going wrong, we’ve compiled the top 4 reasons nobody is reading your content – and how you can fix it:

You don’t have a content marketing strategy

How are you supposed to make good content if you don’t know who you’re creating for, why you’re creating it, and how you’ll help the people you’re making it for? When you don’t think strategically about content, your audience is likely to end up ignoring you – it’s harsh, but it’s true.

Creating a content marketing plan doesn’t have to be a long-winded, complicated project – it’s pretty simple. The Content Marketing Institute have created a one-page content marketing plan template to help you outline your objectives, goals, metrics, and strategy.

Then, all you need to do is go ahead and create an editorial calendar. This can be a simple spreadsheet or document detailing what you’re going to publish, and when – with targetable keywords and title ideas.

You’re not posting enough content

It’s easy for readers to become uninterested, bored and disengaged with you if you’re inconsistent with your content – they won’t wait around forever. Merely boosting a blog a week rather than a blog a month, or 2 blogs a week rather than one blog a week, will go far in boosting your readership and effectiveness of your content marketing.

Don’t get us wrong here – the quality of your content is much, much more important than the quantity of your material. Your content should always be engaging, useful, and informative – anything else is a waste of time.

You’re continually trying to sell

Okay, we get it – you run a business, you want to sell. But the aim of content marketing isn’t to sound like a robotic sales pitch.

Imagine you wanted to buy to get into cycling and needed to purchase a new bike. You start by browsing the internet to find out which product is the best for you. You stumble across a brand which offers you expert opinions on a variety of models, what to look for in a bike, which type of bike is best for different purposes, things to look for when buying a bike – the list goes on. Then, you come across another website – which has a load of bikes for sale and a lot of gobbledygook about their fantastic customer service and their excellent staff.

Which brand offered you the better experience and helped you the most? We both know the answer here. Conclusion? Your content shouldn’t always be sales oriented – but instead, it should add value to potential customers.

You’re not optimising your content for SEO

It’s all well and good sharing your content on social media and out in your monthly newsletter. But to bring in consistent, targeted traffic, you need to optimise your content for SEO. Put simply, using SEO techniques in your content means it’s more likely to be prioritised by Google and placed high in the search engine rankings for particular keywords. Considering most people only click on one of the top five search results, it’s pretty essential, traffic-wise.

When you create your content marketing strategy, you ideally need to do some keyword research (find out what phrases your audience are searching for) and decipher which keywords you’re going to target and how. Then, each piece of content you produce needs to include some of the keywords you’re targeting. We’ve got a more in-depth blog about writing SEO optimized copy – read it here for more tips and tricks.

It’s simple. Your content could easily get ignored if you have no strategy, you’re not aiming to educate, inspire, or entertain your audience, you’re not posting enough, you’re creating sales pitches, or you’re not optimising it to be picked up on in search engines.

Keep these tips in mind as you move on with your content marketing, and we guarantee you’ll see better results. Don’t have the time to create content yourself? Get in touch with 3twelve– we love crafting killer content and would love to help you out.

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