Winning content marketing strategies first explain why people should take action, not what actions they should take.

Bad content marketing prevents many businesses from engaging with their target audience in ways that help grow their business.

Without effectively communicating the value your business offers, customers who engage with your content leave confused and write off your businesses solutions to their problems.

You probably already know that bad marketing doesn’t emotionally resonate with customers. That’s easy to understand, but it can be harder to understand why your marketing messages don’t resonate with customers and exactly how they feel.

Luckily, there’s an easy way to spot bad content marketing without stepping directly into your customers' shoes.

If there’s a theme in bad marketing, it’s a simple one:

Companies with bad marketing talk too much about their solution and not enough about their customer’s problem.

I see this problem frequently among startups.

Startup founders often fall in love with their business ideas and believe their idea and solutions will solve peoples' problems so definitively that they forget to explain why that is.

It’s easy to like your own ideas, but business owners must remember if your solution is innovative that means most people haven't yet seen what you see and you must explain why your solution is valuable to customers.

There’s an easy way to do this:

Don’t focus your content marketing on explaining and pitching your product.

Instead, pitch the problem you solve as meaningful and worth solving.

For example, the problem I solve is that businesses without a robust and structured marketing process lose substantial growth opportunities and incur huge risks when they're marketing their business.

This leads me to have two types of conversations with my target audience of business owners.

One type of conversation focuses on the pain business owners feel when losing opportunities to grow their business and the other conversation focuses on the pains businesses experience when owners try to sustain their business growth.

Each conversation focuses on understanding my target audience's problems and why they feel they should make decisions around the potential solutions.

By understanding the context of my target customer's problems, I better understand what sort of solutions and marketing messages convey value in the contexts that are important to my target customers.

How we solve our target customer's problems is only important once our target customers believe they are worth solving.

If the problem your content marketing focuses on resonates with your target audience, they’ll happily consider your solutions.

If your target audience doesn’t resonate with these problems, you’ve found out something valuable:

customers don’t quite see the problem the way you do

you’re talking to the wrong audience

or

the problem your business targets may not be painful enough to be worth solving

These results are worth getting as early as possible to ensure your business is successful, even if it means giving up your original idea.

Warning signs that your marketing isn’t focused on your customer’s problem:

Here’s what to watch out for to ensure your businesses content marketing stays focused on your customer’s problem.

Focus on Product Innovation

Innovation is great for investors. It means your business has a new solution that could change the world and make millions of dollars in the process.

However, innovation doesn’t directly convey value to customers.

Innovation often conveys value outside the context that customers use to make their purchasing decisions.

A businesses innovation and improvement of an existing solution may not persuade target customers if that innovation is marketed by discussing the process of innovation without presenting the value of the innovation to customers.

People want to know why they need to use your product or service. To do that, your marketing must accurately label the problem customers experience in words they might use themselves.

Once customers emotionally resonate with your problem statement they can be pitched a solution that fits in contexts that matter to them.

How Apple presents the value of innovation in contexts that matter:

Promotion of Product and Industry Awards

Product awards are another example where the opinion of people who don’t buy your products is given more weight in marketing than those who do.

Industry experts think about ideas and award products using different contexts than customers.

Too often businesses promote the expert recommendation of an industry expert whom their target audience is not only unfamiliar with, but also has an entirely separate criteria they judge their product by.

Product awards can be short-term wins that boost sales, but they do nothing to align your interests with that of your customers, which is what will help you grow your business in the long-term.

When you don’t have customers quotes and product reviews, awards from industry experts provide meaningful value.

But that means you don’t have customers who like your product enough to recommend it!

That’s a red flag.

The best way you align your business with long-term success is by providing customer satisfaction.

Rule of thumb: If you have good customer reviews, promote them instead of expert opinions, your business will thank you.