5 Barriers In Content Marketing That Prevent Sales

By Ben Allen, Guest Contributor 

When producing content for marketing, it’s easy to lose sight of the ultimate purpose. You want more sales. Other goals lead to that, like more visitors, lower bounce rate, and more leads, but these goals aren’t what brings in cash.
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If content marketing is a main marketing avenue for you, it’s important to focus your approach on making sales. It’s a sort of balancing act between pushing visitors to making a purchase, creating truly helpful content, and being SEO friendly. Here’s are five barriers that are preventing your content from improving your sales.

​Misunderstanding Your Market
A great content marketing strategy only happens when the creators understands their audience. Misunderstanding can come in a variety of forms that can cripple your efforts. This can influence what topics you cover, the style of writing, what format your content is in, and what keywords you use.

It can be difficult to identify when you don’t fully understand your target market. A great way to ensure you stay on point and understand your market is by building personas for your target markets. It should include what types of content they like and dislike, what their general situation is, and details about how they buy your product.

Another way to make sure you aren’t misunderstanding your audience is by basing all content decisions off of hard data. If you don’t have data to back up a choice, it’s a risk. You might assume that you know what works and what won’t, but it can be easy to mistake your tastes for your audience. Data, on the other hand, doesn’t lie.

Burning Out On Producing Content
Putting our content on a consistent basis is a must for every content marketing plan. Whether you only produce a few times a week or put out several articles in a single day, it’s easy to get burned out. This affects everything you do and results in poor quality content that won’t help you get more sales.

Fighting the fatigue of content production is a constant struggle. Because of the consistent need for new ideas and the demand for high quality production, it can be a drain on a person’s physical and mental health.

There are a ton of tools to help relieve stress, like mobile apps and techniques to keep you mentally healthy.  It’s important to take time everyday to take care of yourself and to do something you enjoy.

To keep your ideas fresh and help you stay excited about producing content, brainstorm ways to shake up and innovate your approach. If you write about the same topic every day for months on end, it can become very easy to lose interest. Changing your topic, format, or writing style (as long as it still makes sense with your audience) can reinvigorate your production process.

Ineffective Call to Action
Without a call to action, your content is doing practically nothing to boost your sales. A good call to action will push consumers along the buyer's journey with the end goal of making a sale. Without it, people will just consume your content and leave your site. A poor call to action will have a similar effect or will lead to consumers doing stuff that doesn’t help them convert to a customer.

Planning out your content in advance and connecting them with proper calls to action can help avoid wasting opportunities. A call to action should reflect what stage of the marketing funnel a person who reads the content is in, and push them to the next stages. Bad calls to action can include: pushing consumers to a different stage of a buyer’s journey they aren’t ready for, providing content that is backwards on the marketing funnel, requesting that they share of social media, or overpromising and under-delivering.

Being Ready When Inspiration Hits
The brains of creative people are always working, even when they aren’t actively trying to find solutions. Some of the best places to come up with ideas is in the shower, lying in bed, or driving to the store on the weekend. It’s because our brains will subconsciously work to come up with solutions to problems and when it figures out an idea, it pops into your head.  

The problem is, we forget stuff all the time. It’s happened to you, it’s happened to everybody. You are missing out on powerful, creative and unique ideas because you aren’t prepared. Find a way to record these ideas at all hours of the day and night.

Not every idea you have is going to be great, but don’t worry about that. If an idea pops up and you think it could be possible good, write it down in a notepad. Or record it on your phone. Or scratch it out on a dinner napkin. Just make sure you have a physical record of your thoughts so that later, you can review them.

One powerful place to record these spots of inspiration is in the cloud. Cloud storage can be useful to small business owners and marketers alike when it comes to collaboration and storage. When inspiration strikes, recording it in the cloud keeps all of your ideas in the same place, gives you access anywhere you have internet and makes it easy to share your ideas with others.   

Not Overcoming Customer Concerns
A major point of content marketing is helping customers see why your product and company is the best solution for their problem. You accomplish this by being the go to source for information and being a trustworthy business.

The problem is that today’s consumers are wary of scams and threats to their livelihood. These concerns can block progress in a content marketing campaign and need to be addressed. Majors ones can include cyber security if they have to give personal and financial information on your site, if you are going to sell their information later, and whether you will be there with great customer support if something goes wrong.

Having content that resolves these concerns is necessary to keep a solid flow through your funnel. If people get even the slightest bit of concern while looking into your products and business, they will flee. You have to be there, ready to answer questions, when they happen. Sadly, you aren’t having a conversation with them, they are simply on your site. The best solution is to identify common concerns your target audience has and produce content to fix it.
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Hopefully, by identifying these barriers, you can now revamp your content marketing strategy and improve where you are lacking. What other barriers do you struggle with? Have you found solutions you want to share with others? Let us know in the comments below.