Lots of brands are still struggling to make content marketing work for them. This is often because many of these brands are still producing content with no real supporting strategy. In essence, they are shouting in an empty room.

The value of content can be measured in lots of different ways. Many brands have their own goals and ambitions for what they want their content to achieve – whether that’s increased leads, improved customer satisfaction or enhanced brand visibility. But for all the benefits we see from content, expressing the contribution it makes to a business in ‘pounds and pence’ remains one of the biggest hurdles for marketers.

With an increasing number of brands creating and distributing content, ensuring your content cuts through the noise, reaches and engages with your audiences is tougher than ever. It becomes even more difficult if you are making any of these five key mistakes.

No clear objective

What does success look like? Answer this before you put pen to paper.

Knowing the objective of each content campaign is vital to ensuring that you not only create content campaigns that are focused on delivering those objectives, but that you also invest in the right distribution channels and dedicate the necessary resource to getting your content seen. If you don’t know why your content exists (and just a hint, the answer is not “because your agency told you that you needed some”) and don’t know what “success” looks like, then it becomes increasingly difficult to justify the investment in content marketing.

Your objectives, and your ideas of success, can be whatever you want them to be - whether that’s brand awareness, engagement, driving traffic, lead generation or direct revenue. But whatever it is, you need a clear idea of what your objective is if you are going to develop an effective distribution strategy.

An unrealistic objective

Of course, any objective has to be realistic. There is no point setting overly ambitious targets for your content campaigns as you will only make it harder to justify content as a marketing activity. When developing your objectives, be realistic, test different techniques, and refine them until you find an optimal level of performance.

Your objective needs to be much more defined than simply “new customers” or “more sales” – generic aims such as this make it hard to quantify the role that content plays in the sales process, and will lead to you simply producing more and more content that isn’t going to achieve what you want it to achieve because it hasn’t been tied to a realistic aim.

However if, for example, your ambition is to upsell or upgrade customers, then you can start to build much more targeted content. You can tailor your message for potentially different audience groups, and you can target that content at a completely different demographic if necessary.

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If your content is about driving leads, then content that is designed to capture data and customer insight is going to play a big part of your strategy but not only that, you need to consider how your content can nurture those leads throughout the funnel, turning them from leads to MQLs or SQLs, and to opportunities.

Overestimating organic reach

Our recently launched Content Distribution Playbook explored the reasons why many brands are experiencing a decline in organic content reach, particularly on social media.

Social networks across the board are restricting the organic reach of branded content, using complex algorithms to essentially ration the distribution of brand messages.

Research by Social@Ogilvy trended the decline in organic reach of branded content on Facebook finding that, on average, content reach fell from 12.05% of a brand’s Facebook audience in October 2013, to just 6.15% in February 2014. For brands with more than 500,000 likes, the reach is even less – falling from 4.04% to just 2.11%. Essentially, branded content was reaching just half of the audience that it was five months prior.

Depending on who you’re willing to believe, you’ll have different views on why this is. Facebook argues that it is simply trying to preserve the user experience, and that the sheer volume of content being posted on the platform means that it has to manage that flow. Other argue that these algorithms are motivated by commercial factors – that Facebook believes that controlling the distribution of a message will encourage brands to pay for sponsored content.

Whatever the reasons for these changes, reaching your audiences – even the ones that are engaged with your brand – is becoming more and more difficult through organic media channels.

Not resourcing for distribution

If organic is diminishing, you need a strategy for getting your content to your audience through some other medium.

There’s not much point in having the fastest racing car if you don’t have enough fuel to reach the finish line. A lot of brands are investing heavily in producing huge quantities of quality content, but not investing in the ‘fuel’ that actually makes this content move.

You need to treat content marketing, and digital content in particular, in the same way you would treat any of your above-the-line marketing activity. You wouldn’t launch a TV campaign without some consideration for buying space, planning media distribution and earned media coverage, and the same applies to your digital content.

Spend time identifying the resources that you will need (both skills and financial) to make your content move.

Missing the mark with your audience

Many organisations have a good idea of who their customers are, and this will usually be widely publicised throughout the business in the form of customer personas. This information is always useful, as it provides a focus for your strategy, but how does your customer demographic translate to a digital audience?

Different audiences and consumer groups will behave very differently from each other when they are online and, as a content marketer, you need to understand how the audiences that you want to attract engage with brands, and engage with the web. Understanding this will not only shape the content that you produce, but it will also shape the way in which you take that content to market, and the tactics and techniques that you need to use in order to do that.

If you are correctly targeting your content at the right audiences and on the right channels, it may simply be that the content is not resonating with that demographic. You need to be able to identify if and when this is the case, and then make objective decisions to address the problem.

Is the objective that you defined earlier on aligned to the needs of your audience and consumer groups? Is the value proposition that you are delivering through content one that they can recognise with? Does it break down those key barriers in the buying process? If not, consider how your content can address these challenges.

If however, your audience targeting and insight has perhaps been a little wayward, look again at your personas and your audience data. Consider revisiting data sources, such as your eCRM data and audience demographics, to identify opportunities for pushing your content to the audiences that are most likely to convert. Targeted lookalike audiences, for example, could open numerous opportunities for growth.