Regardless of your website’s niche or target audience, there is a certain type of content that is ideal for their tastes. As a webmaster, blogger or content creator, it is your job to determine which subjects and styles work best for your audience. As content marketing continues to play a more prominent role in e-commerce and search engine optimization, it is no wonder that a variety of questions have been asked as to how the best content possible can be manufactured. While there is no cookie-cutter way to success in regards to what content will excel, there is certainly formulas for failure that have been documented. Below, we will dish about the most common reasons that any content marketing project will fail and how to avoid this fate.

It’s Too Personalized

It is imperative that you create unique content that is pinging for SEO and targets specific audiences and attempts to be authoritative, persuasive and informative. Personalizing content in this way is highly recommended. Where many webmasters mess up is when they try to make the content specifically about themselves or their brand. One of the best ways to ensure failure for your projects is to ramble on about how great you are or how influential your brand is in its industry. This will be perceived as nothing more than pompous rhetoric; while this approach is certainly valuable for select content (press releases, for instance), your readers and customers want to enjoy your topics and learn more about interesting ideas. You are not nearly as interesting to a random stranger as you might wish to be.

It’s Without Action

Content creation serves multiple purposes, but a huge part of it should pertain to initiating interactions between your readers and your brand. Calls to action are vital if a content creation strategy is to succeed. Once an individual has read or viewed your content, what is next? If you have explicitly outlined what you wish for them to do in the article – or at the very least alluded – then your content should result in more conversions and successful calls to action. If not, then your audience may not understand how else to interact with your brand. You’ll be bringing people to your website, but not necessarily engaging with them in substantive ways.

It’s Not Specific

This is a huge problem for many, particularly those who deal with direct e-commerce models. In the pursuit of larger audiences and potentially more revenue, upstart or less than major websites will attempt to compete across a broad series of search results or sell dozens of different products via affiliate marketing. When you are pinging for SEO, it is imperative that you pick a tight niche with as less competition and as much search volume as possible. Likewise, your content needs to reflect this niche selection and should not deviate drastically – save for the occasional off-topic, fun piece of content.

Conclusion

Content marketing fails in large part due to the content itself. Even poorly promoted or optimized content can pick up steam on its own if it is engaging and persuasive. In order to guarantee chances for success, you need to avoid being overly personal, engage readers via calls to action and target a specific audience. Mistakes in these three categories are the biggest causes of content marketing failure.