Why your great content isn’t producing great results – and how to fix it

When your content is firing on all cylinders, the signs are obvious.

Your audience searches for your content by name, engages with it eagerly, and spends time exploring your related assets. Rave reviews are being posted all over social media. Buyers fill the sales funnel to engage with your sales team and purchase your products.

When your content is stalling, the signs aren’t always easy to spot.

However, you need to figure out how to get the content working again. The best place to start is to look for simple oversights and missteps that cause performance to decline or cease over time.

To help, consider these four common mistakes, as well as signs, symptoms, and corrective actions to get your content program back on track.

Mistake 1: The content lacks a clear and unambiguous purpose

On the surface, your content seems great – it’s creative, well-written, and provides valuable insights to consumers. They regularly produce stories in multiple formats to suit consumer preferences. You share them wherever your audience is likely to search for them.

However, according to their analysis, the audience doesn’t seem to care. Your content doesn’t resonate on any content platform and those who watch it quickly move on without taking action.

Signs of this error

“Great” content that doesn’t resonate or create a desire to engage with your company can indicate a lack of a clear, unified purpose. It often manifests itself as a jack-of-all-trades and master of none syndrome: wanting to appeal to anyone and everyone rather than building deeper, trusted connections that lead to desirable marketing results.

Here are some signs that this error exists:

• You publish content without defining your business purpose or how your content will achieve it.
• You can’t explain who your target audience is, what you expect from them, and what it takes to convert them from casual viewer to active customer.
• Your content doesn’t speak from a unique perspective, leaving your audience struggling to find a compelling reason to engage.

Solution: Create a content marketing strategy

It’s common to believe that broadcasting as wide a net as possible will give your content enough traction. What company would miss an opportunity to connect with a potential customer? But even the highest quality content in the world won’t help the company if you don’t fully understand why it’s being created, for whom, and how it will work best as a company asset.

To achieve this, you need a content marketing strategy. Start with these three questions:

• What goals does the content help the company achieve and what does this contribution to success look like?
• Which target groups should storytelling activate?
• How will these stories uniquely captivate and provide value to these audiences?

TIP: Consider your brand’s priorities through the lens of your audience. Keep an eye on industry trends, market disruptions, and new ideas that can impact the relevance and value proposition of your content.

Mistake 2: The content is narcissistic and lacks empathy

You’ve worked hard to create content that puts your company in the spotlight and presents your experts as thought leaders worth following. But even if your unique views see an uptick, they don’t translate into an uptick in customer behavior or inquiries.

This mistake happens when brands forget that content is a conversation – both parties need to see the benefit of the exchange. Your company may speak well, but fails to give its listeners a voice, show understanding of their problems, or demonstrate a genuine interest in providing help. Potential customers perceive your content as irrelevant noise and refuse to engage deeper.

Signs of this error

Content that focuses solely on your company, its offerings, and its messaging priorities shows that your company is more interested in talking than listening – a common turn-off for today’s marketing-weary consumers.

Remember that the goal is not just to get users to consume your content. It’s about convincing them to convert as customers. This will be more difficult to achieve if you do not demonstrate an understanding of their needs and your unique ability to satisfy them.

Here are a few signs that your content is inadequate:

• Your content is about your products and solutions and not about the needs and interests of the audience.
• Their experience is organized hierarchically rather than contextually, making it difficult for consumers to find the content they need most or act on the intentions that led them to it.
• Your content is all about grabbing attention rather than gaining the audience’s trust.

Solution: Make your audience the star of the content experience

Instead of focusing on your marketing goals first, focus on the customer outcomes you want – not just the transaction steps. Remember that consumers are not abstract constructs. They are people who want to be seen and valued. When your content experience is designed to resonate personally, it will gain traction faster.

These content tactics and techniques work well to demonstrate a genuine interest in helping customers achieve their goals:

• Use social media to build trust, not just for transactions. Pay attention to conversations in relevant communities. Ask questions that encourage your listeners to share their experiences, and then respond to their comments with genuine concern – even if you can’t offer a product-related solution.
• Encourage participation with interactive content. Give the audience something to do, say, see and feel. Allowing them to express their views, opinions, and preferences will make them feel more connected to your content experience.
• Recognize customers and empower them to share their stories. Content like reviews and ratings, case studies, and testimonials allow customers to talk about your benefits in their own words, which can inspire other like-minded audiences to trust your brand and its value.
• Customize information sharing. By giving your audience the power to decide how, when and what information they receive from your brand, the power is in their hands while keeping communication channels open. At the very least, offer subscribers the option to unsubscribe from messages they are not interested in. If you have marketing automation capabilities, use personalization techniques to tailor their content experience based on interests, behaviors, and preferences they have shared with your business.
• Engage community members to lead the conversation about your brand. Your social media communities may be teeming with subject matter experts looking to share relevant experiences and discuss challenges with like-minded people. Offer them the opportunity to improve their profile, for example by moderating your forums as a guest. Not only can this encourage your fellow participants to share authentic perspectives, but it can also increase their interest in contributing to the success of your content.

For example, the Content Marketing Institute asked Jeremy Bednarskia senior content strategy manager at Salesforce if he would be interested in moderating this CMI Slack channel. Five years later, Jeremy’s daily conversation prompts have helped make the channel one of our most vibrant and active community forums.

Mistake 3: The content experience is stale and stagnant

It’s normal for content marketing performance to fluctuate. However, if you notice a steady or significant decline, you may be overdue for an overhaul of your content program.

Business conditions, media trends and consumer interests are changing, meaning topics and tactics that once worked like a charm can lose their relevance and impact. And even previously reliable subscribers and followers may be less receptive to your stories if they don’t reflect current needs and priorities.

Content marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it technique. You must continually update your approach and offerings so consumers see your brand experience as a resource worthy of their attention.

Signs of this error

Failing to adapt your content to new market trends and consumer behavior can harm your brand perception and drive your audience into the arms of your competitors. Avoid this fate by demonstrating your ability to experiment and innovate and embrace new insights and ideas.

Here are some signs that a lack of content agility can jeopardize your customer relationships:

• Your creative team is struggling to generate new ideas and find new ways to address topical issues.
• Your sales plan will focus on channels that your target audience has abandoned (sorry, Snapchat, SlideShare, and X) or ignored emerging platforms and media products.
• Your top-performing search content contains outdated statistics, information, and creative examples, which poorly reflects the relevance and value of your brand.

Solution: Check, analyze and intervene

It may not be your fault that performance is slipping, but it is your responsibility to proactively recognize the warning signs and address obvious signs of stagnation before they escalate into a full content failure.

Test

The process of diagnosing performance issues begins with an audit of your content assets. It can provide a clearer picture of the stories and formats that interest customers most and help identify critical gaps in your coverage.

TIP: The process does not require a massively disruptive undertaking. Streamlined content review speeds up work without losing the guidance you need.

Analyze

Monitor your analytics regularly to quickly identify any high-performing assets that need updating to ensure accuracy. The data can also highlight topics or formats that should be retired, allowing the team to focus resources on areas of greater interest.

TIP: Create a performance dashboard to give the content team an at-a-glance view of the metrics that matter most to your company’s goals.

intervention

Once you’ve analyzed the insights and evaluated your options for course correction, you’ll be ready to tackle even the most intimidating tasks required to regain your audience’s attention and reinvigorate your content’s performance.

TIP: Getting the support you need to implement strategic overhauls and tactical upgrades can be challenging. CMI’s Robert Rose recommends staying the course in the short term while developing a new strategy from the ground up behind the scenes.

Mistake 4: Team resources are pushed to their limits

“Do more with less” is the standard mantra of every budget-conscious marketing department (and show me one that isn’t). Out of necessity and determination, your team pulls together, tightens their belts, and pushes forward as best they can with the resources available.

But there comes a point when the economy exceeds what is possible. When marketers expand their content resources beyond these limits, the resulting stress can send shockwaves to productivity, work quality, and sales.

Signs of this error

A company may need to add a few tasks to their content creators’ to-do lists in an emergency. However, in the long term, these stop-gap measures should not be a substitute for filling critical roles or providing sufficient resources.

When additional tasks and requests add up to an unsustainable level, signs like these may appear:

• The normally well-functioning content team becomes less efficient. They find it difficult to initiate regularly planned actions, let alone implement new ideas and content initiatives.
• Deadlines are often missed, obvious mistakes are made, and exciting projects are left in limbo because the team focuses on the low-hanging fruit that can be implemented quickly.
• Team morale is low, staff turnover is high, and burned-out workers are voicing their grievances on public channels.

Solution: Clarify content, set priorities and collaborate

Companies generally expect their content marketing teams to handle all types of content requests across the company. This scope expansion typically occurs when hiring budgets are tight and no one else can share the writing workload. It also happens when management sees that the competition is making a splash on a new channel and demands that a brand be present as well.

You can fix these problems in a variety of ways, but it always starts with the root cause.

Educate

If management doesn’t understand why your content team can’t just create a few more assets to power a new channel or fulfill their desires, developing (and documenting) a clear content plan is a good idea.

Sharing this business case for content creation and distribution, quality criteria, governance guidelines and benefits can help stakeholders see the bigger strategic picture. Once they realize how much work goes into effective content marketing, they may provide additional support or approve a budget increase.

Prioritize

With too few players and too many requests, your team needs to set clear priorities across content types, channels, and platforms.

Implementing a content scoring process can help with this. It provides a quantifiable way to assess which types of content are performing the strongest compared to industry benchmarks or internal criteria. This information can help you advocate for focusing your resources on meaningful actions and retreating from less impactful actions.

For example, if your company wants to add live streaming video to the mix, start by reviewing some competitors’ efforts in your evaluation worksheet. If you find that these conditions are not ideal for your business (e.g. you don’t have video editors or production resources, your audience isn’t interested in this format, the market is saturated with competing live streams), it’s better to leave Cross it off your list until the situation changes.

However, if you find that this new format offers an attractive opportunity or priority value that you previously struggled to deliver, throttle or pause lower-performing content activities to free up necessary team resources.

Collaborate with developers and technology

If your options are limited and upper management is unwilling to increase or decrease staff, consider a content partnership.

Co-creating content with the help of relevant industry influencers, high-profile thought leaders, and like-minded complementary brands can be a cost-effective way to grow your assets without overloading in-house content creators. Harness the creative talents of your actively engaged community by empowering them to contribute guest posts or other types of user-generated content.

Content partnerships don’t always have to be people-focused. You can unlock content marketing potential by combining your human creativity with the power of technology.

Integrate generative AI and other machine learning tools into your content operations to produce more content – ​​in more formats – with less manual effort:

• Remix and repurpose existing content to bring new relevance and value to older assets.
• Fill gaps in your team’s design or video production skills using AI to transform text-based content into eye-catching videos, animations, and data visualizations.
• Use text-to-audio tools to instantly convert large texts into easy-to-consume audio stories and podcasts.

TIP: Consider these nine additional steps to achieve better content results without breaking your budget or breaking down your team.

Are you having problems? Get answers

While there aren’t easy solutions to all content marketing problems, recognizing warning signs like these four is the best first line of defense against big missteps, misjudgments, and missed opportunities. What other major content challenges are you currently struggling with? Share this article on social media with a comment.

Updated from a September 2021 article.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute