Everywhere you turn, you see companies popping up with new social accounts, and new hashtags to promote their cause of the week. If you are part of the over ninety percent of small businesses, B2Bs and B2Cs that use it, you want to make sure that it works. The problem is that everyone is doing it, but not everyone knows how to. There seems to be a huge disconnect between what marketers are doing, and what is actually working. Just because it seems to be popular, common or important is not automatically mean that it is working automatically. If it isn’t working, it may be time to reexamine your strategies.

There’s no focus

Like anything else in life, in order for something to work, you need a plan to make it happen. You need a strategy if you expect to be successful. You would be amazed at how many businesses lack it for their marketing.  The goal is give customers a way to get in contact with the company and be contacted through their website through a form, email or phone call. If the company has a strategy, is it being implemented? More often than not, it is not, and this is the biggest failure to avoid. You will need a plan to get things going in the right direction.

You aren’t putting money into it

Big pockets certainly help when bringing in people to stores or websites. The companies who spend a lot on marketing are able to grow their markets much faster than those who do not. Basically, you get what you pay for. If you want results, you need to spend enough to make a difference. Is it somewhat expensive? Yes, but if you want to win, read: get people to your company, you need to spend it. But, simply throwing more money at it does not mean that you are successful. You will want to be careful about the spots that you are investing in.

You are sporadic about posting

The fastest way to kill your content marketing is to do absolutely nothing after you create your content. It is not a for sure that users will just want to find the content. The mistake that most make is that organic traffic will increase, people will read it, convert, and *poof* you will suddenly have more customers. That is only part of it. You also have to be consistent about your content as well as promoting it. The important thing to remember about content marketing is that half the work is creation, the other half is promotion. You want to mention your content when you comment on other websites and blogs.

Your content isn’t relevant

Okay, so you have gone through all of this trouble to make something to promote or post. But sometimes, the content just plain sucks. You want to make something that is relevant. You may not know what that is. You have to find the topics that are engaging, choosing an interesting theme and something new and fresh. You also have to pick the right person to do the content for you. Try to find writers who are of good quality. You will want to make sure that there is no competition between your SEO and content that you are making. Rather, you want them to work together in a complementary relationship.

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