How long does it take for content marketing to generate sales?

Implementing a content marketing strategy takes time. The question is, what time is it? There are specialists who only recently decided to test the ideas of content marketing in practice, that is, they barely started to deal with it. Their most common misconception is the expectation of quick results. For them, “implementing a content marketing strategy”, saying it is exaggerated, means last night they wrote the first article on the blog – tomorrow morning we are waiting for sales growth. In all areas, beginners are prone to this error, it is dispelled gradually, in proportion to the arrival of experience and professionalism: a little more experience – a little less than expectations that the result will come easily and quickly.

But there are Internet marketers who did not start yesterday to engage in the creation and promotion of content. They do everything “by the rules.” Their blog is like a clock: at the same time every day – a new article; each material is promoted; many texts and videos get a decent amount of sharing on social networks. But all this does not give the main thing – sales growth. It hurts, it destroys hope and kills faith in content marketing.

Both beginners and non-beginners face essentially one problem: achieving sales growth through content marketing is an extremely difficult task. And the less effort and time spent on the implementation of this task, the more impossible the achievement of the result.

Before your belief in content marketing dies, realize the following thing: many are not able to calculate their strength correctly and do everything perfectly just because they accept the “viral potential” of content as content marketing: they are sure that you need to create materials, who will receive hundreds of shares and thousands of likes, which is precisely the guarantee that sales will grow.

From the fact that your content will simply be widely distributed, sales will not grow. “Virality” is not the key to generating sales. This is verified by many.

Does this mean that it is not worthwhile to achieve a wide distribution of your content on the Web? Of course, it doesn’t. Very worth it. But at the same time, you need to understand that a multi-thousand audience (if you gain strength and patience and “live” to it), reading your content and even sharing it with your friends on social networks, does not think like this: oh, what a cool article, it’s necessary would buy all the products that this company offers!

It is unreasonable to expect that the content will be so “inspiring” for intelligent people who, no doubt, are your audience.

How Content Actually Works

What is the point of the need to widely promote content, why is this all done if you cannot expect a rush of inspiration to buy your product?

The meaning is simple: if you do not stop, continue to invest in creating and promoting quality content that is popular with your crowd of fans (by the way, if you look at it critically, you will most likely understand that it does not perfectly match the image of your target audience – and this also the reason for insufficient sales growth), then you get overtime that your audience gets used to you, your brand, its ideas, you become part of their life. Your audience begins to trust you. And only when this happens, you have the right to count on more – that part of this audience will transform their loyalty to you into real action – to make a purchase.

This is how it works in practice: you repeat the same steps many times, and again and again, you will create content that you like, but will not work, until you start to get quanta in the process of tedious and long work, in the process of trial and error Amazing content that resonates perfectly with your target audience. This is not done in one day. This is a very lengthy process requiring serious effort and investment.

Probably, you are still waiting for an answer to the question, how much time does it take for the content to really work, start generating sales, that is, do what it is actually created for? But there is no definite answer to this question. It all depends on you, on your ability to accurately capture the vector of interests of your audience and create content that resonates with its interests, on your experience and professionalism, on a competent approach to investing in content, on whether you understand that it is expensive and long, but in the end, it pays off with interest, finally, from objective market factors influencing your brand.

So:

• Do not lose hope.
• And if your hope begins to melt, change your tactics: redraw your content plan, look for new ideas, create experimental content – try it, because only putting forward hypotheses and testing them in practice will lead you forward.
• Do not forget about search engine marketing, act in accordance with the rules of search engine promotion. For example, do not forget that keys are a means to get traffic from search, so key phrases need to be organically worked out in your content.
• Be patient: over long distances (and the implementation of a content marketing strategy is, no doubt, a long-distance), long-awaited styers win.
• Remember: getting results from content marketing is a time-consuming process. A large number of shares on this path is not equivalent to a large number of sales. Only when your brand becomes “part of the life” of your audience, you will notice the result.