Is your content strategy working? Is it getting you regular leads, from people you actually want to work with?

If not, it may be because of one of these three common mistakes:

You don’t know who you want to work with…

Firstly, if you don’t know who you want to work with, how can you expect your digital marketing to work for your business and convert into sales? So you need to sit down and figure out:

• WHO your product/service helps

• WHAT are their pain points/struggles?

• HOW does your product/service help them solve this?

• WHERE do they spend their time online?

Only once you know this, can you then start creating content for them. If you’re not sure where to start, look at who has bought your product/service. Then as yourself:

• What do these customers have in common?

• Are they aligned with who you want to be working with?

• If not, how do you need to adapt your strategy, and possibly your product or service to reflect this?

Then, you can start creating content online.

You’re focussing your content marketing efforts in the wrong places.

There are so many places to be creating content online. But it would be a mistake to either focus on the platforms everyone else is, or try focus on all of them. Both will just result in content marketing burnout, and you’ll start resenting content creation. Then you’ll stop posting which will defeat the purpose of having and sticking to a marketing strategy.

Ideally, you want to be creating content solely for the digital platforms that your ideal customer spends their most time on. This may be a few platforms. But you also need to enjoy creating content, as this is the only way you’ll stick to a schedule and stay consistent. I’ve recently heard Grace Andrews (Marketing Director for Steven Bartlett and Diary of a CEO) describe this as a Venn Diagram. On one side you have the platforms your ideal customer hangs out on. On the other you have the platforms you love creating content for. Both sides will probably have a few platforms. The crossover is where you need to start focussing your efforts.

Also, don’t go straight to creating content for all of the social media platforms that you could find your ideal customer on. Start with your favourite out of the crossover from this Venn Diagram analogy, or even better the one that makes the most sense for your business. Keep creating content for this one platform, experiment, work out what is, and isn’t, working. Then, once you’ve mastered and built a loyal following and customer base on here, then you can start repurposing the content you’ve already created for these new platforms (you could create new content, but why do that when you can save time and repurpose the content you’ve already created?).

You’re creating the content you want to see, rather than content created for your ideal customer.

It is a trap we can all fall into, and I’ve definitely fallen into this. Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t create the content you’d want to see/love to create, but keep it minimal, unless it also happens to directly serve the community you’ve built online! Instead, think about what your ideal customer/community want to see.

• What content do they find most valuable?

• What content do they engage best with?

• What content converts into sales the most?

• What content do they find most useful?

• Which content inspires them?

• Which types of content do they engage best with? e.g. videos or carousels or Instagram stories etc.

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll know exactly which content you need to start creating more of. If you’re stuck, or unsure where to start, look at your social media analytics first. These will show you all of the information you could possibly need!

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There you have it, three reasons why your digital marketing strategy isn’t working for you. Fix one of (or all three) of these things and you’ll soon find that your content marketing strategy will start to work so much better for your business!

If you’d like help creating a content marketing strategy that is bespoke to your business, why not book onto one of my digital marketing strategy days. Here we will sit down together, you’ll tell me all about you’re business and we’ll create your digital marketing strategy together, in a way that works for your business and the time you have to dedicate to digital marketing.