Stickyeyes Account Manager Scarlett Whittell discusses five key challenges that she believes marketers are facing – and will continue to face inn 2020.
From keeping your audiences attention and coming up with those killer ideas, through to understanding why you're losing organic search traffic and converting those clicks into customers, just what are the frequent issues that continue to crop up, and how do marketers come up with actionable solutions to solve them?
People aren’t finding my content.
You’ve spent a lot of time creating some great quality, on-brand content but when you dive into the analytics data, the traffic seems really low. So what has gone wrong?
Start by thinking about your keyword strategy and in particular, whether there is enough search volume and whether you are up against a lot of competition for that search volume. If the former is too low, or the latter is very high due to big brands crowding out the space, you may need a rethink.
Does your content fill a need? Is it relevant for a search user? For example, are you correctly deploying functional content that promotes a product, informational content that answers a specific search query and engaging content might, to support brand discovery? If you think you’ve got this mix right, think about active promotion for your social channels and email marketing.
Do you have competing pages? If you do review them one well optimised page is much more powerful than several poorly optimized pages.
Asking yourself these fundamental questions about your content will help you realign your approach and expectations to suit those aims.
My audiences are going elsewhere
So your bounce rates are too high, and your time on site is too low. So why is your audience seemingly leaving you?
The first obvious port of call is linked to the point above, and it involves trying to understand whether or not your pages and your content are providing your audiences with the answers to the questions they have and are allowing them to do what they want to do.
Do research into the intent around the search query and the session to understand what it is that audiences expect from you at that moment. This helps you to analyse what content is needed at that stage and where there may be gaps in your content strategy.
Are you giving your users a logical place to go? Often poor content engagement can be attributed to ‘dead ends’, poor use of call to actions and internal links, and confused customer journeys.
This analysis also overlaps design and UX, so make sure that you’re approaching this from a holistic perspective – not just a search and content viewpoint.
Ultimately, the key to keeping your customers on site is to deliver the best possible experience help them find the information they want as quickly and easily as possible.
I’m struggling to come up with good ideas
If you're short of interesting ideas or struggling with a case of writer's block, your data is a great place to start.
Look at where your audiences are come in exiting your website to spot any potential content gaps and look at the purchase history of your customers to see what your existing customers could tell you about the ones you are looking to attract.
Consider conducting primary research asking for feedback and seeing what your customers want. You can also run competitor analysis see what your rivals are saying and how their messaging is being receive.
Finally make sure it's all relevant. What is your expertise? What do you have the right to talk about?
I’m losing traffic to Google Answer Boxes
More and more, Google is answering questions within the search results, which could be impacting your traffic.
The way to fight this is to make sure that it's your brand content that's in the featured spot - so how do you do that?
The simple answer is to make sure that you have content that answers that question clearly. Answer boxes are small this is no room for waffle. Think about formatting. Could you use the numbered list bullet points and tables to make your information easy to digest?
There are also technical elements to think about. Make sure your content is marked up with the right schema so it's easy for Google to understand what you're saying.
This won't necessarily replace the traffic you lose to Google answer boxes, but it is great for your brand authority and trust.
My content isn’t encouraging driving a commercial action
Your content needs to have commercial justifications. For most of us that means, driving sales or increasing order values. So how do you get the figures rising?
Identify which pages are primarily commercial and focus on optimising these for those commercial keywords, and to drive audiences through the purchasing journey.
Make sure your product descriptions are relevant, engaging, and unique. Highlight the key features and benefits and place them prominently on the page. Use high quality images instead of generic stock photography.
Make sure your calls to action are clear and don't hide important details like returns policies. It's bad for trust and bad for user experience.
