At the very heart of content marketing lies a big, neglected and serious issue. It is the misbelief that good and unique content is enough to turn into a conversion.
Marketers and agencies have invested a lot of time and money in creating high-quality content. But the thing is – it almost never gets discovered by itself.
Audiences cannot find it, share it or engage with it.
If it’s not going viral, it’s pretty much not going anywhere.
What is “good” content
Some people think unique content equal good content.
The need for unique content is inevitable. If your content can be found elsewhere rest assured your target audience will find it. In the majority of cases they will actually better and more detailed resource to quote.
Other people think relevant content is “good content”.
This content should target the specific audience. It should provide answers relevant to the search query you are trying to rank for. Also, do not forget the placement of the “answers” or the audience might not scroll to the end of the article to it.
These, of course, don’t even start to cover the full spectrum of what makes good content “good”.
There are grammar, voice, syntax, emotional resonance, and dozens of other factors that have been skipped entirely.
What would happen if we reduced all the audience needs to just one factor – good content?
It’s impossible to produce fully compliant content.
Audiences and needs differ so much that your ‘good content’ criteria might not qualify on many occasions. Of course, you can always go ahead and hire a specialist to write for you.
However, it would be good to have at least basics of what you want them to do and in which direction to move.
Why does “good content” have to die?
Content Marketing has been a part of our lives much earlier than we realized it.
Companies have been telling a story of their success since before Coca-Cola. Some believe that cavemen drawing of sicks on cave walls was an early form of marketing.
Regardless of your believes, it all points to the same thing: Content Marketing has gone a long way and technology has played a crucial role in the transformation.
Along the way, the market got extremely saturated.
The audiences become picky.
Now, beside “good” content there are things that need to be taken into consideration.
Recent changes in user experience, expectations and link-building strategies added extra complexity to the content marketing.
User experience started to play a significant role in the ranking algorithms.
Google cares more than ever about load speed and device rendering. It pays attention to the mobile friendliness. Furthermore, these are the factors that convince users to give you their email address in the newsletter opt-in.
User expectations have hit the sky.
Beside the speed expected, users expect to find relevant information – and quickly.
Authority has never been harder to do through link-building.
It stopped being easy as build a page and point links to it. Natural flow of links that will stop Google penalties is turning into a hard thing to do.
All this being said, it seems it’s nearly impossible to score links with just a good and unique content. You need to overcome the visibility problem and promote your content the best you can.
But how do we do this?
How to Overcome The Content Visibility Problem
Over the last ten years new content types have kicked into the market.
Lots of great tools and resources have shaped how content looks now.
Videos are omnipresent. Slideshare, Animoto and others have become a prominent resource. Chatbots already represent a new wave of analyzing consumer behavior and scale your marketing strategies.
The trouble here is – we create it, distribute it and never touch it again.
Do not look at your content as a one-night stand.
If you look at your content as a one-night-stand, if you do not promote it and recycle it, you are giving a full permission to your readers to do exactly the same:
Come – Read – Leave.
And if you are lucky perhaps they will share, engage with it or, if you are extremely lucky, sign up. But after that, they will go.
You have to make sure your content stays live as long possible.
Update regularly your article – once written the article should not be forgotten. Try to walk in and keep it live adding new parts to it each time you have something interested to add. Make it better, tweak it and push it live again.
Include sharing options – as funny as it might seem many bloggers forget to include sharing options.
Use curation tools – Hubspot has covered this subject already, so in case you are not familiar with curation tools you can head over here. Using a great deal of curations tools will make your content visible to more audiences.
Turn it into a podcast – Podcasts are turning into the most relevant types of media available on the web. Due to their super-easy-to-use nature and little time-investment to create, podcasts are turning into a very significant role in the content marketing circles.
Distribute – always look for venues that accept duplicate content and try to re-post your content there.
Recycle: Do not just publish and forget about it. After some time has passed go ahead turn it into a podcast, video, or write a post that is an answer to it. Include it in a roundup or simply do another round of outreach to influencers who linked to similar pages.
Great content triggers action
Writing good content and marketing it the right way will take you closer to your goals, but do not forget other, seemingly not that important, things.
Create a content that will have a clear call to action (CTA).
“The CTA is part of the logical progression of a landing page or website. This principle is rooted in psychology. It’s called the perceptual set theory.”, claims Jeremy Smith.
Write for humans, reach out to your audience in your post, pose a question and ask your audience to comment. Or opt for a survey, email with a question, poll or a feedback.
Then go ahead and follow up on all of the actions your fans might have taken. Like their tweets, answer their questions and comments on your blog – engage with them.
Do not just let your blog grow into a quiet, comfy place where readers will (or will they really?) come to grasp on some great tips. Make it a living and vibrant surrounding. Put on some music. Talk to your readers.
Publish – promote – re-promote.
Content is king?
“Content is king, distribution is queen, and she wears the pants. It’s not nearly enough to create a good piece of content. You have to understand how content spreads across the web” said Jonathan Perelman, VP of Agency Strategy at BuzzFeed.
Perhaps marketers haven’t given the issue the focus that it deserves or they have been taking it too lightly. What’s your take?
Author bio:
Mike Thatcher is a Digital Ninja with years’ long experience. Digital nomad by the place of residence, he is passionate about entrepreneurship and leading small businesses and startups, especially in the online world. His best work comes to life when working what he loves most – writing. You can reach him any time on Linkedin.
