When you’re ready to start marketing your content in a new way, it’s essential to determine whether your audience is bored with what they’ve been receiving. This can make or break the success of any marketing campaign. Why connecting with your audience is essential is a question that many marketers have. They want to know if their content is boring or not. There are some simple ways to find out, like using Google Analytics. Let’s be honest about it. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to create heart-racing, super-engaging material that will knock every reader’s socks off 100 percent of the time. Yes, that would be good. However, this does not occur. This is particularly true for businesses in so-called “boring” industries—micro-niches where just a few individuals are passionate about the issue. However, if you’re constantly boring your audience to tears, it’ll inevitably hurt your traffic, leads, conversions, brand reputation, and, eventually, revenue. Boring material is, in a nutshell, terrible. It’s better to have no content than to have boring material! If you believe your content marketing effort is on the verge of failing, you must act quickly to correct the issue. I used to compose some rather dull stuff. I modified my ways when I realized what was going on. I’m not constantly channeling J. K. Rowling these days, but I do recognize when (or if) my audience is bored. What evidence do I have? I’m going to tell you something. But first, let me (kind of) drop the beans: it’s all about data—the warning flags are in the data. Data is your buddy, whether you’re a marketer, SEO expert, or content writer. But don’t worry, I’m not going to urge you to go out and get some high-priced analytics program. Almost all of the data I use in this essay is free. Here are some obvious symptoms that your material is boring to your viewers.
Ways to Check whether your material is boring to your viewers:
1. The bounce rate on your site is very high.
What is the bounce rate of a website? Google describes it as follows: The proportion of single-page sessions is the bounce rate (i.e., sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page). In other words, someone visits your website and then departs. Google Analytics will show you your bounce rate.
How can you tell whether your bounce rate is too high or low? According to the sort of site you have, below are several benchmarks:
A high bounce rate may be caused by a variety of factors. Slow website load times, ugliness in web design, obnoxious pop-ups, and a poor mobile experience are just a few reasons. Mobile bounce rates, for example, are often higher due to specific sites’ less-than-optimal mobile design.
It might be because your viewers are dissatisfied with your material and leave the ship before even halfway through. If your bounce rate is more than 70%, you should be concerned. It’s a significant problem if it’s above 90%.
When there’s no other apparent cause, poor content might be the blame.
2. You either receive a few or no responses.
Are you routinely producing blog entries, guest pieces, social media updates, and other content that receives little to no response? Maybe you’re even asking readers to respond to open-ended questions at the Conclusion to start a conversation. What’s going on? Take this as a warning sign, if nothing else. I didn’t receive many comments on my posts roughly ten years ago when I first started writing. Only 17 people commented on this one post (about postcards?!), and it got almost no social shares:
I may have been sad as a result of that. Instead, I learned a valuable lesson. Perhaps information about postcards bores my readership. So, I guess I’ll have to mix things up. I upped my game and honed in on the issues and manner that my audience desired. A post like this, it turns out, drew hundreds of responses:
The number of comments is a good indicator of your audience’s degree of interest. If you create a sizzling-hot piece on a sizzling-hot issue, you’ll get a sizzling-hot response. However, no one will comment if you write a total snoozer. This type of data tells you all you need to know about the boredom level of your material.
3. Your material isn’t being shared on social media.
Social shares, in my opinion, are one of the most basic but informative indicators in content marketing. A simple peek at the number of likes, tweets, and other shares a piece of content gets may often serve as a basic litmus test for how well (or poorly) it was received by your audience. For example, if “Blog Post A” garnered 250 total shares and “Blog Post B” received just 12, it’s safe to infer that Blog Post A was welcomed substantially better by the readers. While it’s unrealistic to expect every piece of content to be a home hit, a low number of social shares over time frequently suggests weariness among the audience. Your material does not attract your viewers, and they do not believe it is worthy of being shared. The only exception would be if you’re very new to the scene and haven’t yet built up a following. However, if you used to get a lot of social shares and now you’re getting a lot less, it’s possible that uninteresting material is to blame. There’s a straightforward method to track how your material is spread. You may use a program like Buzzsumo to help you. Type your website’s or blog’s URL and hit “Search!” You’ll see something like this on your screen:
You probably won’t get 430k shares on a single article like CNN. However, you should expect to see at least a few. My site, NeilPatel.com, has another free tool you may utilize. To use this tool, type in the URL of your blog and hit the “Analyze” button.
The report will be ready in a minute or two, and you’ll see a progress indicator that shows you where the analysis is at.
Click “Content Marketing” after the report is finished. The social sharing numbers throughout your website are included in the content marketing report. For example, here’s a rundown of my blog’s social shares:
The “page shares per network” statistic shows you which pages were shared and how many times they were shared:
You can also examine how many shares each page has gotten based on the social network:
You may use this tool to obtain a pretty accurate idea of whether or not your viewers enjoy your material. If people aren’t sharing your work, it’s usually because they don’t like it. But let’s be honest. Your shares will be low if your traffic is poor. No one will share your work if no one sees it in the first place. Don’t worry about your low share numbers unless you have high traffic and low share counts. Various factors cause social sharing to vary and plummet. “We’ve lost over half our social referral traffic in the past year,” even a content marketing behemoth like Buffer revealed. They even provided evidence in the form of numbers:
Buffer’s content producer, Kevan Lee, attempted to develop a few possible explanations. Here are some of his possibilities:
- Perhaps we could employ a full-time social media manager to spend more time and effort on exceptional social media work.
- Perhaps I’m not cut out for social media marketing.
- Perhaps our content-to-dialogue ratio is off: too much material, not enough discussion.
- Maybe you’re not the only one who’s failing!
- Perhaps we should publish more often.
- Perhaps we should publish less often.
So, although low share numbers might indicate soft materials, they are not the sole metric to use.
4. You’re not very active on Twitter.
Although determining your actual involvement level on various social media networks isn’t always straightforward, Twitter makes it extremely obvious. Twitter Analytics makes it simple to gauge your level of interaction on the web. Here’s how I work. First, I compare my material’s number of impressions to the number of exchanges, including retweets, favorites, and link hits. Take a look at Twitter Analytics for an illustration of this. The number of tweets is down, impressions are down, profile visits are down, mentions are down, and followers are up, according to a 28-day summary of this Twitter account. This kind of data reveals a general reduction in Twitter interaction, indicating that the information provided on the invoice isn’t very intriguing.
That’s not the complete story, but it gives you a good idea of how my Twitter audience reacts to the stuff I provide there. Twitter Analytics is advantageous since it gives you a month-by-month breakdown of your Twitter interaction. You may find out right away:
- Your most popular tweet.
- The number of people who saw your most popular tweet.
- Your honorable mention.
- The number of engagements you received as a result of your top mention.
- The total amount of tweets you’ve sent.
- The total amount of Twitter impressions you’ve received.
- Your profile has been viewed.
- You’ve gained some new fans.
- You’ve mentioned it.
- Your most ardent supporter.
- The follower count of Your most ardent supporter.
- Your most popular media tweet
- The total number of impressions earned by Your most popular media tweet
Furthermore, Twitter Analytics will provide a clearer picture of who is engaged with you. My Twitter followers, for example, are 61% male and involved in marketing. There’s a lot of delicious stuff in this article:
What is the value of this information to me?
- I’m aware of how, why, and with whom my Twitter material is shared.
- I’m aware of my target audience’s demographics.
- I can rework my material to keep people’s attention longer.
In other words, all of this information has a purpose: it assists me in creating more compelling material!
5. Your unfollow rate is on the rise.
Are your social media fans abandoning you in droves? With each update, is your audience diminishing rather than growing? This is a clear indication that something is awry. Many social media users are picky about what they see on their feeds, and they won’t keep following an account that doesn’t get their engines humming. Many free applications show you who is following and unfollowing you on different social media networks. Unfollowerstats, for example, provides extensive data on who is following and unfollowing you on Twitter.
Tweepsmap is another Twitter utility.
Each week, Tweepsmap sends you an email summarizing who has followed and unfollowed you.
Many unfollows would indicate lackluster material overall unless you wrote anything very objectionable.
6. Overall, traffic is decreasing.
If you’ve witnessed a continuous fall in general traffic, or even worse, a sharp dip, it might indicate that your audience is losing interest. While people may not expect everything you share to be spectacular, detecting a sinking ship is relatively simple. Many folks are just not interested in returning. This might lead to a drop in traffic counts over time. If you’re seeing a decrease in the number of repeat visitors, it’s possible that uninteresting content is to blame. Do a short survey of your traffic metrics on Google Analytics to examine your content from this perspective. I like to run comparison reports to evaluate how my current traffic compares to my traffic from the prior period. Sinking numbers indicate that something isn’t right. This is an example of a website I recently visited:
Data is a complicated beast to control. If you’re not cautious, you can have a mistaken impression of what’s wrong. Data informs you about what’s going on, but it doesn’t identify the issue. So if you feel that stale content is an issue, address it and observe the results.
Conclusion
Boring stuff is not beneficial to anybody. It doesn’t engage your audience, and it doesn’t help your brand develop. But what if your material isn’t engaging enough? How can you address this issue before it spirals out of control? I just submitted an article to the Material Marketing Institute that gives some suggestions on dealing with uninteresting content. This will provide you with some particular approaches for resolving the problem and adding some spice to the scenario. Keep in mind that data is your ally. By continually looking at your data, running your figures, combing over the metrics, and keeping on top of things, you can obtain a clear picture of what’s going on and how to remedy it. To find out whether your audience is bored with your content, you should ask them if they are. Then, you can complement them by asking what they like about the content you have created and then use that information to make changes to keep their attention.
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