Is Content Marketing Really Effective These Days?
The explosion of online content has us asking the all-important question: is it worth it?

Let’s begin with an indisputable fact: content marketing is widely used. 94% of B2B businesses and 77% of B2C’s use content marketing respectively. So why are marketers and business owners suddenly questioning the effectiveness of the historically proven method? Whether it’s down to poor ROI, or simply impatience, in this article we’ll weigh up the pros and cons of content marketing for your business.

Defining Content Marketing

Software-based marketing company Marketo defines content marketing as:

[…] the process of creating high-quality, valuable content to attract, inform, and engage an audience, while also promoting the brand itself. Buyers and consumers are already searching the web for answers that your brand is uniquely positioned to offer.

Content marketing includes the regular posting of material such as: educational articles, blog posts, videos, e-books and images. The content must be interesting, relevant and provide debate or answers to current topics or questions within a niche to keep users returning to your website.

The end goal of content marketing is to become an authoritative force on a specific topic. This will increase your brand awareness and inevitably bring your targeted audience to your website or social platform. Building brand loyalty is crucial. Brand loyalty results in growth as an active and engaged subscriber base will eventually lead to an increase in conversions and profit.

Why you might be Failing

1. Content Explosion

Market saturation has meant the reliability of content and its quality is being called into question. The explosion of content means it's harder to get noticed by your targeted demographic.

Studies have shown there was an 800% increase in blog posts produced over the past five years. However, the organic social shares of those blog posts fell by 89%.

Although brands are producing more content, users are sharing and interacting with them less. This suggests that brands are producing content for the sake of content production. The lack of content strategy has made their production pointless.

2. Your content just isn’t great

in 2011 Google released their Panda algorithm update which aimed to punish content-farming sites of low quality by negatively affecting their SEO and page rank in search engines. As a result of the update, your page ranking will now suffer as a result of low-quality posts. Websites that produce high-quality content will continue to be rewarded. Low-quality content can be any of the following:

⦁ Unoriginal content or has been copied from another source.

⦁ Contains inaccurate or outdated information.

⦁ Contains formatting or grammatical errors.

⦁ Low word count.

⦁ It contains broken or low-quality links.

3. Tough niche or huge competitors

Unfortunately, some niches are harder to create content for than others. If you find yourself in a niche that’s tricky to navigate, you should first look at what your successful competitors are producing. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Grabbing an audience’s attention can be difficult if you’re up against a mammoth competitor that’s dominating the market. If you’re in this position – keep producing content and focus on retaining the small number of followers you currently have.

4. Lack of content promotion

Content creation is only the first step. Promoting the content is just as important. If you’re neglecting the latter and allowing the content to grow stale - then you might as well have not produced anything at all! Social media sites, e-mail marketing and off-site SEO are simple ways to promote your content.

5. High expectations and Impatience

High expectations combined with an impatient attitude can be a lethal combination for your business. First of all, it’s well known that content marketing takes time. The key is to simply keep producing the content. You’ll fall at the first hurdle if you expect fantastic results after only your initial posts. Manage expectations and once results start to show, focus on improving from there.

It’s Actually Essential to Your Business

⦁ 200 million people now use ad block

Marketing campaigns

2. Content leads to brand recall

Social Share

Build an audience

3. Every published piece is yours forever

Unless you take one of your posts down or change the URL, every piece you publish on your site is valuable web real estate that will never go away. Every new URL from your content is another URL that can be indexed by Google and found in organic search results.

4. Content saves money in the long run

If you publish twice a week, you'll have 104 pieces the first year, so the first year you'll produce 104 pieces and get 104 pieces' worth of results. The second year, you'll produce 104 pieces and see 208 pieces' worth of results. The third year, you'll see 312 pieces of results. Additionally, the more people see your name, the more they read your content, and the longer you've been around, the greater effects you'll see with every piece. Great content

5. Content will always have a use

video is starting to overtake written content in terms of popularity, But no matter what happens, content will always be relevant--all that changes is the way it is produced and the way people access it.

Content marketing may be a long-term strategy, but the sooner you start investing in it, the sooner you'll start seeing the benefits.

Wrap Up

Content marketing is a marketing cornerstone. It’s a tried and tested method that has evolved with the times. Is it really effective these days? Yes it is. When implemented with a well-planned content marketing strategy and patience, content marketing can give your business the results it craves.