Feeling completely satisfied with your brand’s content is a rare feeling for most content creators.
If you’ve worked for a small business you know that creating quality content for a campaign only to receive little to no positive feedback or engagement from your audience isn’t a great feeling.
I did some research on content marketing and found that
- The majority of content marketing has limited impact with 75 percent of blog posts getting fewer than 10 social shares and zero links from other domains
- The social sharing of content is down 50 percent since 2015
- 70 percent of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy
This frustrating and all too common feeling mentioned earlier must stop entering the hearts and minds of today’s most talented and promising creators. But how? First it is important to understand this feeling, try to put yourself in my shoes for a second, my feet are sort of small though so in order to make this universally relatable maybe just put yourself into this scenario instead:
You are telling a joke that you think is hilarious in front of a group of people that you recently met and really want to impress. This isn’t just any old joke, this is the kind of joke that you practiced on your friends and family and in front of the mirror multiple times the day before. During the joke you know that to enhance the listening experience of your captivated audience you need to focus carefully on taking your time with the set up, dragging out the rising action and not getting too excited and eager to reach the punchline. At the most crucial and climactic moment of the much-anticipated punchline you say the wrong thing and ruin the entire joke. Then to make matters worse you spend the next 15-30 seconds trying to explain the joke and by the time you finish explaining yourself the once captive audience you worked so hard to cultivate has already changed the topic of conversation. They’ve shifted their focus to someone more interesting, someone who is known to always execute their stories and their jokes effortlessly and flawlessly.
This has happened to me before, and yes, it was embarrassing. Luckily I wasn’t at an audition for SNL that day. Small businesses and startups aren’t so lucky on the other hand. A content marketer named Sujan Patel describes the struggles that content marketers face (read more about these struggles) and says, ““Creating the right content that can get traffic, earn the trust of readers, and make sales. Add in creating unique perspectives that haven’t been said before, and it makes creating high-quality content consistently very difficult.”
Small businesses usually hire extremely skilled content creators, like Sujan but the majority of their work tends to go unnoticed, unliked, unshared, and unappreciated because they have made one major mistake: They tried to compete with big businesses. The key for content creators working for a small business is to focus on making the most of your limited resources and trusting yourself and your content creation capabilities. Even if it seems like your content has no potential to perform well or reach the right audiences just remember that to become a big business you have to be patient but more importantly, creative. Take a look at this example of a company that turned their content that was considered a laughing stock into a successful and viral campaign.
