Content marketing is a long game

For nearly any business, content marketing is an important strategy to consider. Frequently publishing articles, blog posts, videos and other types of content to your website and social channels allows customers and other important targets to find your business in online searches. Additionally, when the content is educational, engaging and easy to consume, you gain credibility, connect with your audiences and develop your reputation as an expert.

But.

Know that this type of inbound marketing is a long game. When producing pieces, simply publishing them isn’t the best marker of success. Nor are the metrics immediately following your publish date. With content marketing, the true measure of success is performance over time. Here are just a few reasons why:

Search engine algorithms are slow.
It can take months for search engines to recognize new content. That means a perfectly keyworded blog article may marinate a while before it begins to generate real web traffic.

Lots of content is good. More is better.
Don’t stop with a couple of videos and blog posts. In order for search engines to take your site seriously, you must continuously produce new content.

Competition can be high.
Chances are good that other people are selling similar products and services as you. If they are also engaging in content marketing online, know that your efforts will be ranked against theirs. Depending on how yours stacks up, this can hurt or help your performance.

It can feel discouraging in the beginning to put time and effort into developing content, only to have poor immediate results once published. It’s important to keep the primary goals of content marketing in mind:

• You’re laying the groundwork for future customers to find you online.
• You’re sharing information about your products and services.
• You’re building trust with your audiences and establishing yourself as an expert.

My advice is to keep at it, use proper metadata for all content and measure the results – which may include site visits, conversions and engagement – over time. If you can’t wait for results, then you’ll want to consider spinning up a digital advertising campaign and/or boosting the content you’ve developed.