Content marketing is a powerful way for business owners to create awareness and build trust for their business or brand. Therefore, you should not be a novice to it.
As you may have known, content marketing is simply a strategy that focuses on producing content regularly, to help you attract your audience and potential customers, who would finally become paying customers of your business.
If you’ve tried implementing content marketing and you’re not getting the expected improvement in your business, you’re probably not doing something the right way. In this article, I’ll point out 5 reasons why content marketing has not been working for you.
1) You lack consistency
No matter how you look at it, consistency plays a major role in improving your business. In addition, it is essential for making your content yield the expected result. Therefore, endeavor that you’re consistently producing good content for your potential customers to convince them more.
2) Your content isn’t relevant to your audience
If your content is so good that it can convert a person to a customer almost instantly, it will probably not convert if the person is not interested in your content or business. That is why you should find out those who will be interested in what you offer, and target them with your content.
3) Do you promote your content?
Creating highly converting or great content alone isn’t good enough — in fact, it is not recommended, especially when you’re a business startup. You should promote your content. In case you’re wondering, that is what other large businesses do — they find out where their audience basically is, and they promote their content to them. On way to promote your content is to use social media ads.
4) You don’t pay attention to your metrics
Your metrics will let you know when they’re most active and how well they interact with your posts. You don’t want to create content for only two or three people to see, every time. Therefore, by paying attention to your metrics, find out what type of post got you much engagement and exactly when you made that post.
5) You’re not implementing any strategy
If you’ve been posting your content and you think you’re doing well, you’re missing out. Content marketing needs you to strategize, if you want to get good results for your business. That said, you can start by defining your goal, which you expect the content to achieve.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve seen some of the things you’re probably not doing right, you can fix those things and try content marketing again. If it requires that you bring in content marketing experts to improve your business, you shouldn’t hesitate to do that. I hope by reading through this article, you’ve found a solution.
I know you must have read in many different articles, what content creation is. You must have also come across learning how to begin your own content creation career. But I promise you, this will be quite interesting a read. Come along with me!
What Is Content?
Content, as you may or not know, is any form of information given to an, or any audience, be it in form of videos, written form, or audio. Content varies by the industries from which they were created, bringing about the different types of content we have today.
Types Of Content
People say that content are mostly only in written, audial, or visual(video) forms. While this is true to a very high extent, we should know also, that there are more types of content. We shall look at those, below:
Corporate content: these are information sent out by companies to audiences, in order to persuade, or update. They are:
Advertisements, which could come in form of copies, or in visual forms.
White papers
Sponsored research
Public relations content
Legal or governmental content: these by the name should imply contents we find, which are authored by legal bodies, such as the government, or other government authorized bodies. Some of these types of content are:
Public history data
Online public databases
Exhibits
National historical data
Public records
User generated content: yes, users can create content, too. This came with the advent of Web-2, where users could also be involved in content creation. While these can be annoying, if they stand to trigger penalties on some sites, they can be useful to other users. Some of them are:
Fan fiction
Remixes of original content
Social media posts, amongst a plenty others
Academic content: these are contents created by academic institutions, for either their students, aspiring students, or the general public. Some of which are:
Books
Journal articles
Academic blogs
Lecture videos
Cultural content: these contents are works of art, made in different art industries, for their respective audiences. Some of them are:
Works of literature ; may be prose, poetry, or drama
Movies
Music
Works of art, such as paintings, sculptures, mosaic, etc.
These are a few types of content. Are there some others that you know? Feel free to drop them in the comment section!
What is Content Creation?
Here, we have come to heart of our discussion: content creation. Let us now define this term.
Content Creation is the offering of information through a medium to an audience, in a particular context. Simply put, it is giving what you know, or feel others should know; that is, expressing yourself to your audience, through a medium. Medium here, could be written, audial, or visual(pictorial, face to face, or video form.)
Now, a person new to this term may ask, how can I create content? Or, how can I get people to love what I create? Which brings us to the next subheading.
Creating Your Own Content
You can create your own content, by first finding out how you want to express yourself. Do you want to write? Do you want to speak? Do you like standing behind the camera? Do you want to draw? Or paint? Or sing? What do you want to do, to express yourself?
Now, you know what you want to do. What to do next? Ask yourself what you want to tell the people listening to you, now that you have found a medium with which you can express yourself.
You know what you want to tell your audience. You have a medium with which you can share your information. But you cannot drop your opinion randomly, without plan. So you plan. Come up with a content creation calendar. This is so that you do not go out of line, and also so that you do not run out of ideas.
You now have a plan, your information, and your medium. You want to create. You have an ideal audience persona, but not the audience itself. So you want to build your audience. How do you do this? I would say begin giving out your content, but if you give out content to people who have no interest in them, you will yield no positive results. So, you look for your audience; find their interests, where they mostly hang out(could be Twitter or Facebook). Then make them your audience; add them up if you must, follow for follow does not sound ideal, but it is not bad either.
Now, you have your medium, your content, your plan, and your audience. What’s left to do, if not create? Yes, nothing. Create your content; write, make a video, sing, speak. Make edits where necessary. Make sure everything is accurate. And share.
That’s how content creation goes. Not satisfied? More research would help.
Who Is A Content Creator?
A content creator is simply a person who creates content. But to put it in a more comprehensive form, it is someone who expresses himself to his audience, in a particular niche.
A content creator could be a vlogger, a blogger, an artist, an artiste, a speaker, a copywriter.
When you log on your socials, there are lots of posts from people. Some people make consistent posts, relating to a particular context, while some just randomly drop pictures, with no intent of winning any attention. The former, is what we call content creators. They make consistent posts relating to a particular niche, to a particular audience, interested in that niche. Notice that they do not drop random opinions. This is because they are trying to maintain the reputation of the context they have dedicated their posts to, and do not want to lose their audience.
They sometimes stray from their contextual posts, but only seldomly, and it is maybe only to entertain their audience.
In essence, a content creator knows his niche; the niche that interests his audience, and does not stray to irrelevant topics.
I am sure now, that you have an idea of different types of content creators. But if not, for sake of emphasis, we shall look at some:
Content Writers
Vloggers
Speakers( podcasts, motivations)
Artists
Artistes
Actors
Teachers (tutorial blogs and vlogs)
Health care personnels (health care articles and vlogs), and a lot more.
We have covered what content creation is, who a content creator is, and what a piece of content is. Now, let us look at the reasons people create content.
Why Content Creation?
People create content for so many reasons. And those reasons, are we about to find out. Let’s get started.
Mainly, it is because of the monetary advantage. In our article on vlogging, we were made to know what an average YouTuber makes monthly. About $2000 -$4000 monthly! That’s a lot, if you ask me.
Before the monetary advantage, people created content, to attract attention. Yes, in order to attract attention from the audience they wanted, they create content that interests their potential audience. How does this happen? The already existing audience shares their content, and a potential consumer sees that content, and traces the author, and that author is followed!
Some people create content just to entertain others. It may seem like too much work to do, just to entertain people, but that is how opportunities meet those content creators.
Some create content as their occupation. Just because many people create content for the monetary advantage, does not mean it is their occupation. But for some people, creating content is their job; some vloggers, for example. And some content writers who write for companies.
Some people also create content for their own sake. Some people create content just to express themselves. Some people that may do this are, artists, users such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram users.
These are some reasons to why people create content. Why do you create your content? Why do you want to create that content?
PS: Knowing why you are creating a piece of content can help you create quality content, so you should have a reason, or better still, a purpose in mind.
I hope that you know now, what content creation is, what creating a piece of content entails, what a piece of content is, who a content creator is, why you want to create content, and what you stand to gain from content creation.
I hope also, that you now know how to start a content creation career. If you don’t, I suggest you read the article again. And if after that, you still do not know how to, then you should make more research.
I hope finally, that you found this article helpful.
