4 Reasons Why Your Business Blog Is Not Driving Optimal Results (& How to Fix It)

A poorly performing blog can drain resources, such as manpower and finances, without delivering the desired impact. This can harm online visibility, damage business credibility, and lower customer engagement, all while reducing ROI.

Underperformance can also damage search engine rankings, resulting in fewer organic traffic and potential sales. To achieve long-term business growth through content, it is crucial to optimize your blog.

Content creation and marketing are critical components of marketing campaigns, as they lead to successful lead generation and enable marketers to generate and nurture high-quality leads while keeping costs low.

While you can manage the content part easily for a business blog, a few factors can contribute to less-than-optimal results. In this post, we'll go through some key reasons why a business blog may not perform well and how to fix it.

Let’s begin!

#1. Lack of content strategy for a business blog

It is important to carve out a clear content strategy for the blog to ensure its success. Well-defined objectives for a blog help track online visitors, measure success, identify weak spots and opportunities, and optimize it accordingly.

Business blogs may fail if they lack purposeful and compelling content. Around 58% of marketers emphasize creating original, written content. Moreover, Google defines a purposeful post as "original content that provides value for users."

A lack of content strategy can have the following repercussions:

1. Inconsistent messaging: Having a content strategy for a business blog helps identify topics and themes for articles. It leads to clarity among readers and is a step further in creating a cohesive brand identity.
2. Poor content quality: A lack of content strategy often results in poor content quality because there needs to be clear guidance on the standards and expectations for each blog post. And this comes from a well-crafted content strategy that states content format, brevity, basic readability, etc.
3. Inefficient resource allocation: A clear lack of content strategy makes it difficult to allocate resources effectively. This wastes time, effort, and budget in creating content for a business blog that aligns with larger objectives.

How to fix it?

• Start with sharing content that matches your audience’s expectations. Ensure creating content that satiates different purpose of audience engagement, build brand awareness, and drive business growth. Consider creating meaningful connections and delivering value by catering to diverse audience needs to promote, educate, inspire, and entertain them.

• Define clear goals for your business blog. This includes increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or providing valuable customer resources.
• Plan content topics and formats based on those goals. Create a list of content topics and formats that pique the reader's interest while helping you achieve business objectives.
• Lastly, create an editorial calendar with a publishing schedule to drive posting consistency and allow efficient resource allocation.

#2. No consistency in posting the content

A successful business blog requires consistent publishing of relevant and helpful content. Often, this requires multiple writers working on different topics and delivering content as per the schedule. Here, the editing team must also remain active to ensure churning out quality content regularly.

Your audience expects fresh content regularly, and search engines like Google monitor website activity to ensure the blog remains active.

Outdated content can negatively impact your website's search engine ranking and reduce blog traffic. Prevent this by following a publishing schedule that lets your readers know when to expect new posts.

In such a case, hosting a business blog on WordPress is beneficial since it offers different plugins for scheduled publishing. You can benefit from a WordPress collaboration plugin that helps streamline the process with faster editing and multiple authors working on a single document. This ensures everyone, from the writer to the editor, remains committed to faster, quality content publication.

Consistency is key, and it's better to post once a week, twice a month, or three times a month rather than increase the number of blog entries.

Here are some quick ways to fix blog post consistency:

1. Create a content calendar that helps establish a posting schedule based on outline topics and deadlines. This can help maintain a steady flow of content and keep you organized.
2. Leverage content themes and categories related to your niche that can inspire multiple blog posts. This can help you generate ideas and maintain consistency in developing and publishing a specific set of content.
3. Set reminders, deadlines and notifications using project management tools. This helps keep track of your content calendar and ensure meeting your publishing deadlines.
4. Define roles and responsibilities for everyone in content teams. When more than one author works on content, use content collaboration. This can fasten the content creation process.
5. Develop a routine that helps establish a writing routine that suits your schedule and preferences. Consistency in your writing habits can help ensure you always have content ready to be published.

#3. No focus on the target audience

Business blogs often use a certain language or format or develop complex topics that are difficult for a general audience to comprehend. Remember, the content is not for industry peers, especially top-of-the-funnel content. Therefore, it must be simple to understand, address customers’ pain points, and add value to their business.

A poor-performing business blog results from failure to identify the right audience, where you may get the traffic but not the conversions. The reason is that many uninterested people are checking out your content but not resonating with what you offer. Just having traffic is only worthwhile if it turns into repeat visits.

When there is no focus on a target audience while creating a business blog, several negative consequences can arise.

Here are some downsides of overlooking the target audience for a business blog.

1. Decreased engagement: First, if the content does not connect with the readers, the engagement is bound to drop. And because of this, there will be fewer likes, comments, and content sharing. Also, since they do not subscribe to your content, it hinders the growth of the business blog.
2. Difficulty building a loyal audience: Second, for the audience to return frequently, you must tailor it to them. Building a loyal following without creating content for the target audience becomes difficult because a loyal audience will likely become customers and advocates for the business that brings in more organic traffic.
3. Difficulty in measuring success: Next, a clear target audience makes it easier to set goals, track metrics, and measure the blog's success. This makes it difficult to optimize content, identify areas for improvement, and allocate resources effectively.
4. Hindered SEO performance: Lastly, you must recognize SEO, which is pivotal to driving organic traffic to a business blog. Not tailoring content for the target audience can be challenging to identify and target relevant keywords, leading to poor search engine rankings and reduced visibility.

Overcoming such an issue requires defining the target market for your content. This means you'll need to create personas of people who will consume your content. You must address a target audience's needs, preferences, and interests.

Let’s explore some of the tips for fixing this issue.

How to fix the target audience issue in a business blog?

• Conduct audience research: A business blog requires researching the target audience to understand their demographics, preferences, needs, and pain points. Besides surveys, market trends, and analyzing competitor content, start leveraging web analytics data to gather insights.
• Develop audience personas: Next, research to create audience personas representing your ideal customers.

These personas should detail their age, occupation, interests, challenges, and motivations. Use these personas to guide your content creation process and ensure it aligns with your audience's preferences and needs.

• Create relevant and valuable content: Focus on producing content that addresses your target audience's interests and solves their problems. For instance, it can include how-to articles, case studies, industry news, or opinion pieces that offer value to your targeted readers, encouraging them to engage meaningfully.
• Optimize content for your audience: Tailor your content's language, tone, and style to resonate with your target audience. Avoid jargon or complex language if your audience prefers a casual, conversational tone. Similarly, ensure that your content's format, such as text, video, or infographic, suits your audience's consumption preferences.

#4. Creating content aimed at the wrong part of the funnel

A business blog focuses on creating content for readers at each stage of their buying journey, from educational and informative content to product-specific use cases. As the audience progresses through the sales funnel, conversion-driven content is necessary to drive engagement.

Creating content at the right part of the sales funnel can positively impact a business. For instance, a purchase-driven CTA would be common for bottom-of-the-funnel content. But most buyers aren’t ready to purchase when they enter your funnel (at the top).

Therefore, failing to provide value and a reason to buy at the top and middle of the funnel and instead pivoting to selling may fail the content. It causes irrelevant content, increased bounce rates, and lower conversion rates.

Blog content will primarily be based on a specific stage of the buyer's journey:

1. Top-of-the-Funnel (ToFu) Content: It is designed to attract new audiences, educate them, and spark their interest. It includes blog posts, social media posts, infographics, and videos addressing a general business topic.
2. Middle-of-the-Funnel (MoFu) Content: Such content focuses on nurturing leads and guiding them further down the sales funnel. MoFU content includes e-books, webinars, and case studies that provide more in-depth information about the brand.
3. Bottom-of-the-Funnel (BoFu) Content: This type of content is designed to close the deal by giving them the confidence to buy. It includes product demos, free trials, consultations, and other types of content that help the audience make a purchasing decision.

How to fix funnel-based issues for business blog content?

Each stage of the content funnel will have more focused content, which may have a lower search volume but is highly impactful in building your niche. An ideal approach is targeting readers at different content funnel stages.

Create content that addresses the unique needs and interests of individuals at each stage of the content marketing funnel:

1. Awareness stage: Consider creating awareness for your brand or subject matter. Create informative content that addresses common pain points or questions. For example, this stage will have blog posts, articles, infographics, and social media content to raise awareness.
2. Consideration stage: Next, you will need to craft content for readers actively searching for solutions to their problems and comparing options. Such content should showcase your subject expertise and establish yourself as a thought leader. Consider creating in-depth guides, whitepapers, case studies, webinars, and comparison articles highlighting your unique selling points.
3. Decision stage: Readers are close to purchasing at this stage. Therefore, create content to reinforce their decision, persuading them to choose your product or service. This can include product demonstrations, customer testimonials, reviews, personalized consultations, and detailed FAQs.
4. Retention stage: Lastly, retain an audience by sharing useful product tips on the blog. Include industry insights or educational content that addresses their needs. Consider sharing customer testimonials or case studies highlighting customers' positive experiences that reinforce the value of your products or services. Also, you can keep them informed about product improvements, new services, or company news.

Over to you

Businesses aiming to drive optimal results through blogs must avoid the above-mentioned bottlenecks. But if you relate to any of the above mistakes, we have shared solutions to help you bounce back and effectively engage your target audience.

Besides considering the tactics shared in this post, remember to monitor your blog's performance at regular intervals. Managing a successful business blog is a continuous process of monitoring performance, identifying areas of improvement, and optimizing content to satisfy readers and search engines.