In the world of marketing, everything you create to represent your brand, communicate with your audience, and generate leads will be marketing content. This includes:

• Email designs for your subscribers 
• Social media posts to initiate conversations with your customers
• Videos to engage your audience 
• Blog posts that help increase website traffic 

And so much more. 

How do you know if your content is actually communicating with the intended audience? Let’s talk about some signs that indicate possible gaps in your content marketing strategy.

Telltale Signs of Gaps in Your Content Marketing Strategy

• Your website traffic is either dropping or not showing measurable improvement 
• Customers are not spending enough time on your website or app
• Your website isn’t ranking well or the search engine rank has not improved 
• Too many cart abandonments in the case of retail businesses 
• No significant change in the Followers’ count on social media 
• Not many views on YouTube
• Customers are not engaging with any of your posts (through Likes, Comments, Saves, and Shares) 

You might notice a combination of these signs as most of them are connected. These can all occur because of unclear understanding of the audience, lack of powerful content, or even a weak reach. Knowing what these gaps are will be the first step to building a robust content marketing plan. 

Gaps in Content Marketing Strategy And How to Fix Them 

Once you know that there is something wrong with the content strategy, you should definitely begin by evaluating the quality of your content. A content audit will be the first thing to do. In fact, frequently auditing your content will help you get a foothold amidst competition. 

And the last stage in your content audit will be revisiting and tweaking your content marketing strategy. Below are some of the gaps you might want to address and resolve on priority. 

1. Your content marketing goals are not clear 

Everything looks fit and fancy until you try to identify KPIs to evaluate your progress. 

If you do not know what to measure, how will you know if that Facebook ad you had recently spent on is actually making an impact on your business? 

On Facebook, when you create an ad, one of the first parameters to select will be the objective of the campaign. Below are some of the objectives that Facebook defines for ads. 

As you can see, you need to have a clear objective laid out before you launch your campaign. If there are no clear objectives and your content is not aligned with these objectives, it will be a gap that leads to major hurdles in marketing. 

You will only be able to gauge the effectiveness of your campaign when you know what your goals are. Even when you look at ad insights on Facebook, you will notice attributes like Result Rate that talk about the performance of that particular campaign and this is purely with respect to the defined objectives. So, it all boils down to having clear goals for each campaign. 

Many social media platforms like Facebook come with comprehensive Business marketing suites. So, you will be able to shortlist possible goals for your campaign. But what about print ads? In fact, you cannot identify these goals after you have your content ready. It should be the other way round. 

2. A very concentrated set of distribution channels

On Facebook alone, 1.6 billion people around the world are connected to small businesses. Social media, therefore, has a strong role to play in a brand’s customer engagement. And eventually, brand growth. So, you cannot rely on search engine marketing alone. 

Gone are the days when brands could get a handle on digital marketing through PPC campaigns alone. Your website ads might not reach potential customers who do not use their computers frequently. Your promoted Instagram posts have less chance of getting noticed by valuable leads who do not access their smartphones often. 

So, a good content marketing strategy is one that is designed to expand the reach by diversifying the distribution channels. 

Kimp Tip: With a bunch of channels to focus on, content creation might appear more hectic. One effective way to tackle this will be to repurpose your content smartly. So, you do not have to come up with something fresh for every single social media channel.

But how do you come up with versatile designs that are worth repurposing across social media channels? Try Kimp Graphics today for unlimited access to designs for all your digital channels, and print media too. 

3. Unclear audience targeting 

What are you aiming for? Communication or a mere transmission of information? If you want to present data and have your audience respond to it, you should do it in a language they understand. You should deliver the message in a tone they will listen to. 

Sometimes your content marketing plan does not go as projected or you end up spending more on pushing your content to your audience than you had predicted. Wrong targeting of the audience can be one of the reasons behind these. You are either targeting a group too wide or you are narrowing down too much. Overfitting and underfitting are both harmful and they lead to your content marketing efforts not providing the intended results. 

Inaccurate targeting of the audience happens when you are not clear about the scope of your brand’s offerings. It requires a thorough understanding of the market. Think of your product as a solution to an existing problem. Identify the type of people who commonly encounter this problem. And then create content to convincingly communicate with your audience how your brand will help solve this problem. 

4. You do not have strong visuals to support the text 

Blog posts, newsletters, case studies, and every other text-heavy content type that businesses use to generate leads and enhance traffic now incorporate a lot of visuals. 

36.7% of marketers find it challenging to keep producing engaging visuals for their content. This is growing to be a common problem in content marketing. And that matters because visuals make content easier to navigate through. They affect the overall user experience. 

For example, images and infographics have the power to make blog posts and articles much more interactive. An informative blog post will appear like an exhausting read when there are not enough visuals to break the content into easily consumable sections.

Infographics have the power to simplify the visualization of vague concepts. 

Adding infographics and images will also bring in more customers to your blog post through image searches. And the best part is that if you create on key image for a blog post, you can reuse it when you create posts on social media to link to your blog posts. 

Kimp Tip: Instead of going with monotonous stock images, try incorporating original graphics and custom illustrations to add value to your blog. These graphics will support your textual content and make sure that customers stay on the page a little longer. And such unique graphics will also make customers on social media stop and pay attention to your post. 

Need a consistent inflow of blog images to make your blogs more visually interesting? Kimp Graphics subscription lets you place unlimited design requests. 

5. Not incorporating enough videos 

Based on a B2B content marketing survey conducted by Content Marketing Institute, for more than 69% of marketers, video is the top priority in content marketing investments for the year 2022. And nearly 33% of them found how-to-videos as effective tools to improve their content marketing performance in recent years. 

Videos are not just for brands that have an active strategy for YouTube.  Retail businesses need videos to boost the effectiveness of their listings. All types of businesses benefit from the use of demo videos. They can be on your landing pages, website home page, or even emails. 

Videos have the ability to humanize your brand. Even simple voice-overs or practical demonstrations can boost the whole experience considerably. Customers get to know your brand and your products better with videos. 

Videos on social media can be used to make customers stop and listen to your message. Even simple character animations or digital display loops will make your social media Feeds more engaging. All types of motion have the power to grab attention and that’s something that makes your content work better on social media. 

Kimp Tip: For your video content to make a difference you should have both long-form and short-form videos on your social media plan. Besides the standard short-form videos, trending concepts like cinemagraphs and GIFs can make your Instagram Story or even Facebook Story livelier. 

Finding it tough to constantly create video content for your social media? With a Kimp Video subscription, you can have a variety of video types designed to boost your content marketing plan. 

6. Poor understanding of the buyer’s journey 

Your sales and marketing copy as well as the design will all be different for different stages of a buyer’s journey. One big gap in content marketing will be the lack of personalization of content depending on where the customer is in this journey. 

Knowing where your brand currently stands, create strong brand awareness videos to target new leads. These should not be displayed to existing customers. Provide product recommendations through emails, create blog posts on buyer’s guides, and have a quick comparison chart to display on social media. These are ways to add value and make your existing customers notice your content. 

For example, an email that provides your existing customers a discount code should not take them to a landing page that talks about what your brand offers. It should not take them to a lead capture page that asks for their email id or contact details. 

Instead, the CTA in this email should ideally direct customers to the product page or a page from where they can compare their options and place an order. Put in simple words, it should be an effort to shorten the sales funnel. 

So, if they are able to place an order in fewer clicks by clicking on the CTA in your email, they will continue to respond and react to your emails in the future too. 

The right landing page designs to support your ads and posts, the personalization of email content, all come from a clear understanding of a buyer’s journey. You should also keep a close eye on customer information and marketing analytics data to get the right cues about customer behavior and shopping decisions. 

7. You’re telling, not showing 

“Show, don’t tell” should be your motive if you want your content marketing strategy to actually bring good ROI. We’ll give you an example to explain this better.

Here’s the scenario: A restaurant business wants to advertise its new meal platter. Here are two strategies that can be used to create content for promoting this new item on the menu.

Strategy A: Create elaborate content that talks about the unique mix of ingredients that go into the making of this item. Tell customers how the ingredients are carefully sourced.

Strategy B: Create a visually-rich blog post with images that give customers a peek into the preparation process. And the feature image will be the best shot of the actual meal platter you are promoting. You also have visuals of actual customers relishing on the said platter. And a video that shows how your ingredients are directly sourced from local farms. Of course, you have crisp text content that lists down the ingredients used. 

Which strategy do you think will have the maximum impact on the target audience? Strategy B, without a doubt. 

“Chicken that’s carefully basted with wine” will not have as much impact on the users as an actual picture of the scrumptious chicken. So, understand what kind of content works for your business, for your particular niche, and then combine the right visuals and text to evoke all the right emotions. That’s what “showing and not simply telling” is all about. 

Your content should excite your customers and make them want to try your product. Not just become aware of the product only to forget about it the moment they come across something more visually memorable. 

Tackle Content Marketing Gaps With Graphic Designs From Kimp

Fill those content marketing gaps one at a time, starting with the one step that many marketers are optimistic about, using relevant visuals to engage your customers across different channels. And what better way to be sure that you always have something fresh to offer your audience than to pick a graphic design subscription! There is Kimp Graphics for all your graphic design needs, Kimp Video to save time in video marketing, and Kimp Graphics + Video to combine the perks of both at a flat monthly rate. 

Can’t decide which one to choose? Try it for free for 7 days.