Over the past four or five years, the talk has been all about how easy it is to create content for a digital marketing strategy. Heck, even I was sharing weekly tips and tricks on how every Australian business can become a brand out there.
However, as I was putting out more educational content, the reaction I was getting from business owners was: “We get your point, but still we have no idea and no time to do it.”
Increasing numbers of business owners have tried and failed at content marketing, so they decided to do one of two things:
- Hire someone in-house to deal with digital marketing
- Reach a terminus point of frustration and give up
One of the main reasons a digital marketing strategy fails doesn’t stand in how that strategy performed, but in how you understand WHY it performed well or not.
Looking at your content and figuring out what is working and why is one of the biggest content marketing challenges at the moment for a lot of business owners and marketers alike.
There are so many variables to consider why something worked (or didn’t work):
- The type of content (blog, video, graphic, article re-share, humour, etc)
- The social platform
- The timing of the post
- The graphic used (colours, imagery, etc)
- The copy
- …and more!
All of these factors need to be tested (then measured)
Another point to consider is that you cannot create a report if you don’t know what you are trying to achieve with your marketing. So before the reports come your goals: why are you online and what are you doing here?
This way, when you are working on the monthly reports, you can focus solely on the data that is relevant for you: those numbers that can teach you where you went wrong, what you did well, and most importantly WHY all this happened.
Otherwise, you could be looking at reports, choosing the information that you think looks best in pie charts, and delivering a report that (while it may make your boss happy) gives you nothing on what you should be doing next with your digital marketing strategy.