According to recent research from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 89 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing. This kind of saturation makes content marketing difficult but not impossible.
If your content marketing isn’t performing the way you want it to, consider these 10 possible reasons why before giving up on the strategy altogether.
1. You have no strategy for content marketing: Of the 1,102 respondents to CMI’s 2017 survey, 61 percent of the most successful marketers have a documented strategy for content marketing versus only 13 percent of the least successful marketers. The research showed that 37 percent of all respondents had a documented strategy.
A few key things for developing a documented strategy (or to improve it if you already have one):
Start with your key performance indicators: figure out how you will know whether your content is succeeding or failing.
Your strategy should be fluid: content marketing that works today might not work six months from now so be prepared to change your strategy to keep your content working efficiently.
2. Your content marketing budget is too small: Companies that spend more money on their content marketing can grow their market faster than companies who spend less. You get what you pay for,” might be clique but it is true. CMI’s research shows that on average, the most successful marketers spend 39 percent of their total marketing budget on content marketing compared to the 22 percent average spent by the least successful. 
Content marketing is expensive but the ROI is worth it. If you have a small budget to work with, focus on methods with the greatest ROI to start.
3. You’re not promoting: Creating content is only half of content marketing. If you create content but do nothing to promote it you are going to fail. In content marketing, heavily promoting a small amount of content performs better than having a lot of content that you rarely promote.
Some ways to promote your content:
- Email newsletter
- Tweets
- Google+
- Pitch influencers to share your content
3. You have bad content: All content marketing has an effect on your brand, but shoddy content can have a negative effect. Some bad content comes from not knowing what kind of content to create. Sometimes it’s because you hired writers with low rates or a freelance writer who doesn’t know enough about your industry to effectively blog about it. Another reason your content is bad is that it’s boring to your audience.
4. You’re up against a large competitive market: If your competitor(s) is the size of Goliath, content marketing is a struggle. If this is the case, you can focus on building a small, devoted fan base rather than trying to out-market your competition. You could also analyze your competition’s content to identify missing or bad content and capitalize on those topics for your content.
5. You’re not giving it enough time: Quality marketing isn’t going to give you overnight results, so make sure you’re giving your content ample time to work. 
6. Poor SEO: While content marketing and SEO are two different marketing strategies they work best together. Bad SEO can render your great content useless because people can’t find it.
7. You’re in a tough niche: If your target audience doesn’t spend much time online or is a very specific market it will be harder to have exceptional results with content marketing compared to a niche that targets an audience that lives online and is much broader.
8. You’re expecting too much: Quality content marketing can do great things for your business. However, if you’re expecting it to triple your revenue within a month, you’ve set up for failure.
9. You’re not having fun with it: If creating content to market has become a dark, agonizing thing for you then engaging with it will be a dark, agonizing thing for your audience (leading to the fourth reason for failing content). You don’t have to turn your content into non-stop jokes to have fun, but you should experiment with ways to lighten the mood of your content to keep it enjoyable for you and, thereby, your audience.
This is not an exhaustive list of reasons that content marketing fails, but these are among the most common causes. If you still have questions about improving your content marketing, contact us and we’ll be happy to help.