If you are familiar with the digital marketing world, you must have heard people talk about content marketing. Though it is one of the most powerful marketing tools, can it be used to maximize your brand’s PR exposure? The answer is yes. However, you will need to create high-quality content if you want to turn your PR campaign around with the help of content marketing tactics.
But, sometimes, even high-quality content fails to make its mark. It can be frustrating to spend hours creating an appealing piece of content only to see it suffer a high bounce rate. Most content writers and PR managers have been through this ordeal at least once in their lives. So, why does your content fail to strengthen your PR campaigns even after putting tremendous amounts of effort?
What Are the Reasons of Content Failure?
Though high-quality content plays a crucial role in public relations, it is not enough. A few other factors such as actionability, relevancy, and what exactly your content delivers also play a part. Below are a few reasons why your content may fail.
- Failing to identify the right target audience
- Lack of purpose and credibility
- Poor optimization and layout
- Inediquate research
- Failing to promote content
1. Failing to Identify the Right Target Audience
If you don’t know who your target audience is, how are you going to create the right content? Even within the same niche, different target audiences have different content requirements. Unfortunately, almost 45% of B2C marketers don’t tailor their content to a specific buyer’s persona or stage of the buyer’s journey.
To connect with your potential customers, you must create content that resonates with them directly. For example, if your company produces baby-care products, your target audience should be married couples that are going to have a baby soon. In other words, you need to create content related to first-time parenting, baby-care, hygiene, and nutrition.
Defining your target audience includes finding out
- How your audience segments itself across the Web?
- How they interact with each other or share content?
- Where do they hang out on the Internet?
- What sort of content (blog posts, infographics or videos) do they like?
- What are their primary concerns, problems, and ideas?
Failure to define even one of these factors will result in the failure of your content irrespective of its quality.
2. The Lack of Purpose and Credibility
The content you want to promote across your market niche will fail to impress if it lacks purpose and credibility. Even the most experienced content writers and PR managers fail to produce original content ideas with purpose. According to Content Marketing Institute, only 6% of B2B marketers considered their content marketing efforts to be “very effective” in 2016.
Before creating a piece of content, you must understand what purpose will it serve and how.
- Purposeless content is neither memorable nor sharable.
- In addition to the purpose, your content must have credibility.
- You can increase your content’s credibility by adding relevant resources, statistics, expert quotes, and even images and videos to generate more likes.
- Though you have to focus on creating a narrative that readers can relate with, you shouldn’t lie. Using falsified or dubious statements to support your content will certainly land you in hot water.
3. Poor Optimization and Layout
Your content will be rejected by the target audience, irrespective of its quality, if it lacks appeal. Usually, content with short and crisp paragraphs, bullet points and checklist, and relevant images gets more shares and likes.
According to BuzzSumo, articles with an image once every 75 to 100 words got double the amount of shares compared to articles with fewer images. They also received a minimum of 30 more shares compared to articles with more images.
A recent survey also states that 60% of B2B content marketers find creating engaging content most challenging.
4. Inadequate Research
Sometimes, you get caught up in generating new ideas to the extent that you fail to give research the attention it deserves. Research is an important factor in creating a remarkable piece of content.
According to a survey, it takes 3 hours 16 minutes to write an average blog post. However, 33% of bloggers who spend more than 6 hours per post report “strong results” compared to 23% of the ones who spend less than 6 hours per post. So, the more time you invest in your content creation (i.e. research), the better.
When it comes to paying attention to the content research, keep the following points in mind.
- You must search for compelling and intriguing, but little-known information.
- Make sure to find out the primary source of the information whenever possible, including research studies, government-generated statistics, and article or blogs written by industry experts.
- Try to find the latest statistics and data to support your content.
5. Failing to Promote Content
Promoting your high-quality content across the right distribution channels is vital for PR campaign success. In fact, maximum publicity is the second-half of your PR equation. Just as you need to find the target audience, you also need to find the influencers and the distribution channels they use to get maximum publicity for your PR campaign.
- Every niche has a few influencers with thousands or even millions of followers. They have the unique ability to reach large niche audiences within a particular market segment.
- In fact, nearly 70% of teenage YouTube subscribers trust influencer opinions over traditional celebrities. So, failing to team up with influencers in your niche will limit your publicity scope.
- Alternatively, you can also identify the key publishers in your niche. Try to build strong and mutually-beneficial relationships with publisher and influencers in your niche.
- You can also reuse and repurpose your content to get the maximum publicity for your PR campaign. However, according to the 2016 content marketing staffing and tactics study by Curata, only 12. 29% of leading marketers systematically reuse and repurpose content.
Conclusion
While there is a whole lot content being churned out every day, it is obvious that only that which makes an impact will produce the desired results for a PR campaign. Effective content needs to be relatable, factual, practical and actionable. In my next post, I will discuss about the factors that make content actionable and offer easy tips on making this happen for you. Watch this space for more!
