No matter how big or profitable your company may be, there is no way to keep it competitive in the long run without content marketing. That’s just the way things work these days – you need to publish a lot of quality content to raise awareness, build trust, generate leads, and drive conversions.
Content marketing is a huge privilege of the modern business because it helps you to approach highly targeted audiences around the clock – a feature traditional marketers could only dream of just a decade or two ago. A wide range of studies prove the potential of this marketing tactic:
- Content creation generates over three times as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less.
- Companies publishing more than 16 blog posts per month report 3.5 times more organic traffic than companies that publish up to four posts a month.
- Nearly 50% of buyers view at least three to five pieces of content before contacting a sales rep.
- Over 90% of marketers use digital content to approach their customers.
Content creation is obviously a successful and widespread marketing strategy, but does it guarantee such tremendous results every time? The answer is clear: If you don’t do it properly, content marketing cannot help your organization to grow.
In this post, we will explain to you the nine most common mistakes in content marketing. Let’s take a look!
Do It without a Plan
The first mistake a business can make is to play the content marketing game without a well-defined plan of work. It’s an issue we get to see very frequently as, according to the research, only 37% of businesses have a documented content strategy.
If you want to make things work to your advantage, you need to define a strategy and determine the goals of content marketing. There are many different objectives to think about here:
- Increasing online visibility
- Boosting search engine ranking
- Proving the status of an industry thought leader
- Generating fresh leads
- Improving customer loyalty
- Driving conversions
Each of these goals demands a highly specific type of content, so do your best to identify the most important objectives and design your strategy accordingly.
Writing for Yourself and Not for the Audience
Too many marketers focus on their business goals so much that they forget one simple fact – they are not writing for themselves, but rather for their audiences. You should be smarter than that and publish posts that concentrate on the needs, problems, and issues your average buyer is dealing with.
The goal is to clearly define a buyer persona and write with this person in mind all the time. This is what you need to learn about the target consumers:
- Average age, gender, and location
- Relationship or marital status
- Average income and level of education
- Personal interests and beliefs
- Hobbies and everyday habits
- Previous interactions with you business
Using Simple SEO Tactics
Everybody understands the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) these days and content marketers are by no means an exception. After all, it’s a necessity in the world where 93% of all traffic comes from a search engine. However, not everyone is eager to utilize advanced SEO techniques to help the content stand out.
Digital marketers who want to grab the attention of search engines need to embrace cutting-edge SEO rules and use them for each new post they craft. It’s impossible to mention every mechanism in one paragraph, but the most important advice is to go beyond simple search terms and focus on longtail keywords instead.
Not Developing a Unique Style
This is one of the most common blunders in digital marketing since lots of content creators fail to realize the importance of developing a unique style of writing.
Jake Gardner, a blogger who wrote the best essay writing service review, explains that the style is the only thing that can help you distinguish from other content creators: “If you are running a highly professional business, try writing authoritative posts with lots of facts and data-driven conclusions. But if you are targeting younger consumers, don’t be afraid of using jokes and humor.”
Create Unprofessional Content
Digital content can be unprofessional in many different ways. First of all, a blog post may be too short to send a meaningful message to the audience, so it’s better to write longer articles.
Secondly, a post may be poorly structured, without subheadings and whitespace to improve the readability. Besides that, you could be using low-quality of stock images that seem boring and artificial.
All those details will harm user experience and chase away too many followers, so do your best to keep the content highly professional in 100% of the cases.
Crafting Monotonous Content
Another problem many people fail to realize is that they are crafting the same sort of content all over again. It’s a surefire way to turn into a boring digital resource, so be careful not to annoy users with monotonous posts in the long run.
What does it mean?
It means you need to mix the content and use different techniques to impress the target audience. For instance, you don’t always have to publish written posts. You can create a video or infographic from time to time, but there are many other formats such as audio podcasts, memes, image galleries, GIFs, graphics, charts, and so on.
Selling Instead of Educating
If there is one thing users hate the most, it is noticing that you are always trying to sell products or services through the content. Keep in mind that the purpose of content marketing is not to drive sales – at least not primarily – but rather to inform and educate the audience.
Our recommendation is to rely on the famous Pareto principle. It means you should publish 80% of articles with the idea to educate the audience and solve common problems. On the other hand, you can save about 20% of posts for promotional content that is supposed to convince users to test or purchase your products.
Forget to Repurpose Evergreen Content
Content repurposing is a valuable tactic that allows you to repackage the existing post and publish it as a brand new piece of content. The tactic fulfills two very distinct purposes:
- It helps you to boost users’ interest with pretty much the same post once again
- It helps you to publish something fresh when you run out of content ideas
Although it may seem weird, content repurposing is actually an impressive tactic. According to the report, almost 30% of leading marketers systematically reuse and repurpose content.
Using Social Networks Inefficiently
The last mistake on our list is also one of the most common among content marketers. Namely, only a handful of content strategists seem to be genuine masters of social media marketing, with the main issue being the lack of focus.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to launch an account on every social platform out there. On the contrary, your job is to identify networks that can make the difference for your business and concentrate on these channels only.
For instance, a B2B organization probably doesn’t need Instagram and Pinterest pages, but LinkedIn and Twitter are certainly the two options they should consider. You should do the same thing and carefully select social networks that suit your business goals.
Conclusion
There is no better way to grab the attention of the target audience and build relationships with the prospects than to invest in content marketing. It is one of the most productive marketing strategies that can help you to grow professional authority, generate leads, and drive conversions long-term.
But the situation gets much worse if you don’t pay attention to content creation traps. In this post, we pointed out the nine most common mistakes in content marketing. Are you making any of these content marketing mistakes?
This guest post was written by Susan Saurel, a full-time digital marketer and a part-time blogger from Houston, Texas. Susan specializes in content writing campaigns and social media marketing, but she is no stranger to other topics such as email and paid advertising.
