How to Lose a Prospect With Poor Content

If you are trying to increase the number of leads or sales for your business, quality content should be an essential part of your marketing strategy. However, there is often confusion among businesses as to what type of content is most effective.

In addition, creating content that is effective requires a… Continue Reading…

If you are trying to increase the number of leads or sales for your business, quality content should be an essential part of your marketing strategy. However, there is often confusion among businesses as to what type of content is most effective.

In addition, creating content that is effective requires a big investment. Learning what works and what doesn’t when it comes to content strategy quickly can save your business a lot of time and money.

Keyword-stuffed Generic Content

Despite the fact, that Google has warned many times over that keyword-stuffed generic content would do nothing to boost rankings, this type of content is still found in some places on the web.

If educating your customers is an important part of how you convert them to buyers, you must make a greater investment in your content. If not, your failure to invest your content strategy means you are losing sales.

Not Focusing on the Audience

Writing content to promote your business, does not mean that the content should be all about your business. This mistake is commonly made by businesses that pass the important job of content creation off to interns and other individuals that are wholly uninvolved in the sales and marketing operations of the company.

Handing your content strategy off to someone who has little knowledge of or interest in marketing is a major mistake because they don’t understand what it takes to convert that potential customer to a paying one.

You can see these failed efforts in the content strategies of companies that continuously have content that promotes their businesses but provides little to no helpful information to the potential customers.

Read:  Developing a Content Calendar

Poor content “cheapens” a brand by destroying credibility and instilling mistrust. It also indicates that the brand is not making a significant investment in its marketing and therefore neither should you as a customer.

In addition, these companies often lose out to competitors in the end because customers begin to rely on the educational information being provided by other companies in order to make purchase decisions.

Focus on What Works for Your Industry

Your content creation strategy does not have to involve trying to reinvent the wheel. If you are trying to figure out exactly what will work best for your company, in many cases all you have to do is look as far as your fiercest competitor.

  • What kind of content are they putting out to customers?
  • What can you do differently with your company’s own content strategy to display your unique value proposition in the market?

Leads and Sales, Not Rankings

Although many SEO companies obsess over better rankings in order to get better results, the real conversion determining factor will be the content on the page that the visitor is directed to from the search results. It doesn’t matter if you are number one for a particular keyword if the traffic that comes in does not convert!

Track Your Results

The reason why the importance of content is often lost on many businesses is because they do not track their results. In addition, they also often provide dubious instructions via an unclear “call to action” making it difficult to determine if the content actually played a role in getting the prospect interested in the company’s products or services.

Read:  3 Keys to Figuring Out Your Content Marketing Needs

When you include a “call to action” in your content, provide one instruction only. The instruction should not be to call us, email and like us on social media. Instead, pick just one action. You can also include tracking links or a special phone number extension to help you determine if the new leads came directly from that piece of content.

Tracking with the right content marketing and marketing automation tools can make all of the difference when it comes to converting customers with content. Testing is also extremely effective for determine how to optimize your content for the best results.

If you need assistance with developing a winning content marketing strategy, we can help. Click here to learn more about the content strategy services that we use to build your brand.

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