It can be frustrating when you think you’re doing everything right, but you aren’t getting the results you want. If you own an automotive business or are trying to make your mark in automotive marketing, this article is for you. This is one content area that can be a bit volatile. There are so many directions that you can take your blog, it’s hard to tell sometimes why your content is being ignored.
Well … chances are there are several reasons. I want to dive into a few of them today and see if we can’t figure out together what’s going wrong with your content. What follows are what I consider to be five key reasons. I see them over and over, and I have a few insights on how to avoid them.
1. You Aren’t Writing to the Correct Audience
Many automotive bloggers tend to write content to one audience but market to another. This is a problem. It’s important to know your audience and deliver content that attracts the right readers. This is accomplished through a number of avenues, but here are a few of the most important:
Reading Other Successful Blogs — If you are having trouble getting your blog off the ground, take your cues from successful industry bloggers. Don’t copy their content, but do take note of the content they’re publishing and emulate the style, subject areas, and presentation they use. It isn’t all about the written copy — your support content matters.
Selecting Relevant and Timely Keywords — Keyword research is mandatory, and it should be performed for every article. Plug in criteria that apply to your target audience. Sometimes, the keywords that Google suggests might seem a little out there, but anything rated medium or high is likely to boost the probability that people will find and interact with your content.
Taking Your Own Tastes and Preferences Out of the Equation — This is probably the biggest error most marketers make. I like it, so my audience will, too. What do your numbers suggest about that? Don’t live in denial. Always look to the market for your cues on the content you produce. You don’t have to like it; you just have to produce it (and make it good).
2. You Aren’t Marketing to the Correct Audience
Maybe the problem isn’t the content itself. Maybe you just aren’t targeting the right people. How do you do that? Here are a few suggestions:
Create Email List Segments to Determine Who Is Consuming Your Content — You will learn very little if your numbers are a big mish-mosh of your entire list. It’s decipherable but tedious. Segmenting your list eliminates several steps from the process and gives you a much clearer picture of where you should be targeting your marketing.
Listen to Your Social Audiences — Negative feedback or a total lack of engagement are clear indicators that you’re not in the right place. There is another opportunity here, though. Start a new blog to augment your main one based on what you learn about your audience. Publish, promote, and see if things turn around.
Join and Interact in Different Social Media Groups — Take your content to a few new places and see how it’s received. You could be very surprised at how people you don’t expect to react and engage positively actually will. You will also learn quite a bit about your audience and how you should be approaching it.
3. Your Content Is Too Technical or Too Simple
There is a fine balance here that most automotive content marketing professionals miss: how to best present information and ideas. Blogs need to inform, entertain, and elicit a response. If it’s failing in any of those areas, it’s time to regroup and figure out why. Most of the time it’s that the way the content is presented is either too full of industry speak or oversimplified and devoid of useful information.
Which of those things is the real problem depends on who your target audience happens to be. If you haven’t narrowed down who your ideal reader is, this would be a good time to start — before you wind up producing more content that falls flat. Think about it: It’s much easier to have a conversation with someone than to write an open letter. Figure out who you’re trying to reach and just talk to that person through your blog.
4. You Aren’t Using Every Available Content Tool to Promote
At the heart of every successful blog is a framework of support measures that help ensure success. The most important of these is still SEO. That’s where keyword research comes into play, but it goes much further. Here are a few things that can make or break your blogging and website marketing efforts:
Thorough Use of SEO — Here’s a hint: Your site is probably nowhere near optimized. Consider performing site audits on the regular to see where your site in general needs help. Since I’ve gone over all the key elements so many times, I’ll leave it to you to investigate what content elements are spotlighted in an audit.
Responsive Websites — Make sure your content is consumable on any size screen. A site audit will tell you whether it is, among many other things related to SEO.
5. Your Writing Isn’t Impressing Anyone
I’m not suggesting you’re a bad writer. I am suggesting that professional writing services like Beez have the upper hand on content creation. We also have the time and resources to get it right and give you a more authoritative presence with your content. In marketing, it’s always good policy to stick to what you’re good at and farm out the rest. Working with professional writers is one of the best decisions you can make for your blog, email content, newsletters, social media, and more. Contact us today to learn how you can increase the “Wow!” factor of your copy.
