As marketers, we spend vast amounts of time, effort, and sometimes money producing content and campaigns that speak to our prospects and customers to convince them to move to the next step of the customer journey. But there are ways in which our content and campaigns fall short for our audiences.
In this blog, I’ll show you the four reasons your content isn’t working and what you can do to improve.
1. Your Content is Not Relevant
Every one of your prospects and customers is different. They have their own wants and needs. They are at various stages of interacting with you as a brand, they are looking for different things, they will be convinced and put off by different things. It is impossible to create one message and make it relevant to your whole audience.
How do marketers solve this? Personalize content based on customer desires using a combination of explicit (form filled data) and implicit (calculated data). This should be across every channel not just email.
2. Your Content is Not Timely
The world is moving faster than ever, and there are so many demands on our time that often when we are looking into products and services, we are doing so in a small 15-minute chunk of our day. We do it on our terms when it suits us. No matter what I’m looking for, I need to get the content to answer my questions when I need it. I do not want to have to wait for a week to get a callback, I do not want to wait until the right email is sent to me as part of your newsletter program.
How do marketers solve this? As far as possible, use inbound channels to personalize the experience for your visitors. Whether you are using web personalization to serve up relevant products, FAQs, or contact information, or if it is serving push notifications through your app, make the experience relevant for the user when they are engaged. Aim to trigger your results immediately so that your users do not have to wait.
3. Your Content is Not on the Right Channel
Think about your mobile phone. You’ve got email, text messages, instant messaging, phone calls, apps. You probably use each of these for different things. At the same time, if you were to ask an older relative, they would use them differently than you do. Ask a younger relative, and they are likely to use them differently still. And all of this is context based. I personally wouldn’t want my bank to start a Facebook Messenger conversation with me, and I wouldn’t want my friends to send me emails when they have a trivial question. Everyone uses different communication channels differently. Yet as marketers, we tend to think simply of cost.
How do marketers solve this? Stop guessing and start asking. Ask people which channels they want to receive information through and adapt accordingly. You can do either as part of the email sign up process or later down the line.
4. Your Content is Not Consistent
If I’m a customer visiting your website or calling you for support, my content should be just as personalized as that which winds up in my inbox. As a loyal customer, if I have to go all the way back to square one when I know you have information about me, I’m going to get frustrated quickly. We’ve all had the experience of being handed around at a call center. We’ve also likely had a similar experience where we’ve called in, and they know exactly who you are, your history with the company, and are able to assist you immediately. Having a one-off campaign that is relevant to the individual isn’t enough, it needs to be consistent across every campaign on every channel.
How do marketers solve this? Rather than creating ad hoc campaigns in a manual “spray and pray” process, use software which allows you to collect data on who your audience is, what they are interested in, what they want to receive, on which channel, how often, and allow it to do the heavy lifting for you. It simply is not possible to do all of this and stay consistent to all of your audiences through manual work.
Which of the above is the biggest challenge for you? Are there any other reasons you think content doesn’t work? Tell me about your struggles or solutions in the comments.