8 Mistakes You Must Avoid in Your Content Marketing
Content being the king of all marketing activities worldwide, content marketing has gained popularity over time as one of the best investments a brand can make.
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Key takeaways
- Content being the king of all marketing activities worldwide, content marketing has gained popularity over time as one of the best investments a brand can make.
- Here are some content promotion strategies you can follow: - Share your posts on social media in different formats.
- Rushing in implementing your strategy or being a part of the rat race makes a brand prone to these mistakes.
Content being the king of all marketing activities worldwide, content marketing has gained popularity over time as one of the best investments a brand can make. It’s great to generate leads and build thought leadership in the industry- both of which make for a great brand. Seth Odin calls content marketing ’the only marketing left,’ given its authenticity and adaptability with new age media and the online generation.
But, as more people realize the importance of content marketing, the competition is rising, and the market is being saturated. As a result, user attention is diminishing. Your marketing efforts should be exceptionally calculated and in line with your business goals and vision.
This also means that you can’t afford mistakes. But, given the race for content marketing and the excessive amount of money companies keep aside for it, these mistakes are bound to happen. But if you’re in it to win it, then there’s a way to avoid those mistakes: by learning from them.
Let’s explore some common content marketing mistakes and how you can work your way around it for maximized results.
Content Table #
- Not having a strong content strategy
- Not understanding your audience
- Not creating goal-oriented content
- Not experimenting with content formats
- Not promoting content effectively
- Not keeping up with trends
- Not paying attention to CTAs
- Not tracking performance
Not Having A Strong Content Strategy #
More than 60% of businesses don’t have a documented content marketing strategy according to the Content Marketing Institute. This means that a majority of the businesses use content marketing with the ‘hope’ of making it work.
Content marketing is more than content creation and distribution. It uses a much strategic approach to understand the audience, align the audience’s needs and brand needs, and then establish a plan of action keeping in mind the analytic that needs to be tracked.
If you don’t have a documented strategy in place, your team will always be confused, and you would be investing a lot of time, effort, and money on things that may or may not yield the desired result. This is because you don’t know what you’re doing, how you will track it, and if it’s necessary to do it. It’s like shooting arrows blindly. Are you willing to take that risk? Probably not.
Consider following these steps to draft a content marketing strategy for your brand backed by an effective action plan:
- Define your goals and objectives.
- Understand your audience and their buying habits.
- Do competitor research, understand where you stand in the market.
- Based on research, decide on the channels you want to create content on and where your audience is present the most.
- Decide what type of content you’re going to create.
- Divide the work among your team. Content marketing is a team effort, and transparency always wins.
- Start creating content after establishing an editorial calendar for efficiency.
- Promote content.
- Analyze your efforts by tracking metrics.
And there you have it, an elaborate content marketing strategy that defines your plan of action every step of the way. Documenting this process will help prevent gaps, give a better idea to the team, ensure efficiency in execution, and provide results. You can use team collaboration tools which immensely help in this area by coordinating everything in one place and avoiding any kind of confusion.
You can use this infographic by BlueHost as a checklist while creating your strategy and tweak it as per your brand goals and objectives.
You should focus on preparing a strategy because it lays out clear fundamentals useful in the long run to track progress and introduce changes for better results. Moreover, following a strategy can lead to the achievement of the larger goal because small wins lead to the big ones, and makes the process easier.
Pro tip: If you’re an individual or agency providing content marketing services to a client, you may want to use a proposal template to display an outline of your strategy for better conversions.
Not Understanding Your Audience #
Original diagram for Techfastly by Vin Patel.
While content is the glue that holds a content marketing strategy together, you cannot just brainstorm content ideas or create content on the first 5 things you see online. Even though it may reside with your industry and niche, it may not cater to the audience- and that’s the biggest mistake you can make.
If you want to generate leads, build a relationship with your customers, and nurture them, you need to understand them first. The more you know your audience, the better your content marketing results will be.
But how can you understand your audience? Consider starting by doing these things: Ask yourself some questions Before you understand them, understand who you want to serve first. Try defining their demographics, buying capacities, habits, daily activities, and things that would be ideal for ‘your’ customer.
Carry a market research Once you’ve understood who you want to target, try to see where you can find these people. What platforms are they present on, how do they communicate with each other, what language they use, what type of content they consume, how much they are willing to spend every month, etc. This will help give you a clearer idea about your audience and set a course for realistic expectations.
Look over to your competitors Your competitors, the ones who have a similar target audience as yours, are probably ahead of the game. They’ve been doing all of this and assessing their moves. You can see how their strategies have worked out and how the audience is responding to them. This will help you identify gaps that you can fill through your plan.
Carry a survey Once you’ve defined your audience, assessed your competitors, and gathered a fair amount of information about your audience, it’s good to fact-check. There’s nothing better than directly surveying your audience through a questionnaire, asking them essential questions that will help you create and execute your content marketing strategy better. Keep the survey crisp, and to the point; if it’s never-ending, no one is going to fill it.
If you’ve missed out on these points, then you’ve been making this mistake. But it’s never too late to reform it. Because the last thing you want is wasting your resources or watching your efforts yield minimum to no results.
After you’ve done your target audience research, it’s ideal to create a buyer persona- a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, which will help guide all your marketing strategies, especially your content such that it’s targeted directly at helping your audience.
Better be safe than sorry!
Not Creating Goal-oriented Content #
Every piece of content you create as a part of your content marketing strategy has a goal. This can be for SEO, for lead generation, to get contact details, to nurture your customers, and so on. But if you don’t know why you’re creating a particular piece of content, then you’re just wasting your resources.
Being specific on your goals and creating content around it ensures that you’re walking in the right direction, and your content will yield the desired results.
There are numerous stages of a buyer’s journey, and creating content, especially around it, is so important because it caters to a specific goal.
Here are the different stages of a buyer’s journey and the type of content you can create at each stage: Awareness stage Your prospect is aware of the problem they are facing at this stage, but don’t know if it is important enough to seek a solution. Here, they need to be targeted with content that can help them troubleshoot the problem and understand it better. The main goal here is to educate the customers, only then will they be able to understand properly.
The content for the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey can be:
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- White papers
- eBooks
- Webinar
- How-to videos
ConsiderationAt this stage, they’ve gathered a brief idea about the problem they’re facing and contemplate if you’re the right solution for their problem. Here, they need to be targeted with content that portrays you as the best solution for their problem and a perfect fit for their requirements. This content needs to be backed by data and social proof that displays your expertise.
This stage is crucial because it’s only here that they decide if they should go forward with you or move on and choose someone else. It determines whether they will turn from a prospect to a paying customer, so the approach needs to be convincing.
The content for the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey can be:
- Comparison videos
- Case studies
- Free Samples
- Buying guides
Decision stageThey have decided that they want to be your customer at this stage, so they think what it takes to be your customer. Here, you need to present content that tells them they have made the right decision and can fully invest their faith in you and leave their problems at your disposal.
This stage is important because they’re on the edge of being converted, and the way you respond now also sets the course for future collaborations, and if they will continue purchasing from you.
The content for the decision and beyond stages of the buyer’s journey can be:
- Free trials
- Testimonials
- Coupon and discount
- Upgrades
Original diagram for Techfastly by Vin Patel.
Creating tailor-made content as per the stage at which your buyer stands is crucial because it’s meant for a specific goal. Without this, you could be showing educational content to a buyer in the decision stage when they’re fully aware of the problem but need to be convinced that you’re the end and ultimate solution to their problem.
This will also make your content marketing strategy much more specific and achievable, ensuring that your customers are targeted the right content at the right time.
Not Experimenting with Content Formats #
Content marketing is not defined by nor is restricted to just blogs and social media posts. There are ample content formats that should be included in your content marketing strategy. Why?
Because it prevents your content on multiple channels from being monotonous. Have you ever thought of using letterhead and graphics in your email instead of just a text newsletter?
You can always experiment and combine different content formats to make your content more appealing and engaging for the audience.
Content formats and including multimedia in content is an essential part of user experience which cannot be missed out on.
Let’s explore some content formats you can include in your content marketing strategy:
Blogs
Your good old-fashioned blogs are an important part of your content strategy because they account for a significant part of SEO and help establish thought leadership by catering to the target audience’s pain points and major struggles.
With blogs, remember to optimize it for SEO while writing for humans by including white spaces, using short sentences, and using storytelling to evoke emotion. For content topics, you can use Quota and Answer the public to find important yet less-answered questions.
Infographics
Infographics help relay important information in a detailed format through visual aid. It attractively communicates the message to help the audience understand the topic much better. You can find plenty of templates on Venngage and Canvas, and tweak them to create your infographics.
If you’re answering an important question, it can also be used as a lead magnet to get email sign-ups.
eBooks
eBooks have recently taken momentum as one of the most popular lead magnets and free resources, with brands using eBooks to educate their audience in a more profound sense by providing extensive value. These can be a mix of text and multimedia, addressing an important topic in your industry, which would help many people solve their problems. Since an eBook can be downloaded and read later, people are slowly prioritizing them over other forms of content to educate themselves on relevant topics.
Videos
With the rise in video marketing, more and more companies are now including videos in their content marketing strategy because they help establish a one-on-one connection with the audience. These can be bite-sized videos on social media or long videos embedded in blogs and uploaded on YouTube.
You can also repurpose your blogs and social media posts into videos to provide better reach to your content.
You can incorporate many other formats in your content marketing strategy like podcast, checklists, cheat sheets, and email newsletters, giving a significant edge to your strategy. It’s inevitable for your audience to be everywhere and like all your content. To give your content greater reach and provide added value to your audience, adapting and using these formats is a great way to get ahead in the game.
Not Promoting Content Effectively #
Original diagram for Techfastly by Vin Patel.
Many people think that the execution part of a content marketing strategy ends after you hit the ‘publish’ button, but that’s where the real work starts.
If the content is king, then engagement is queen- and for people to engage with your content, you need to promote it excessively and through different strategies to refresh your content and introduce it to newer audiences.
It’s ideal to have a content promotion strategy in place to know the first few steps you can take to ensure that a published piece of content doesn’t die soon.
With so much content creation and consumption online, it’s easy for your content to get lost, so it would be best if you promote your post the right way within 24 hours of it getting published.
Here are some content promotion strategies you can follow:
- Share your posts on social media in different formats. A tweet on Twitter, a carousel post on Instagram, and a video on Facebook are some ways you can begin promoting your content.
- Send out an email blast to your email list as soon as you hit ‘publish.’
- Include the link to your latest post(s) in your email signature. Since we send many emails every day, there’s a high chance, someone or the other would be curious enough to click on the link in the signature.
- Leverage your community and share your content on social media groups, since these groups comprise like-minded people, they will definitely share it with their network if your content is good.
- Connect with influences and talk to them about promoting your content or endorsing your product.
- Leverage guest posting. It allows you to publish content on niche-specific websites that help your content reach their audience, thus expanding the reach.
There are numerous other ways to promote your content, but these top the list. You can always get innovative with your approach and brainstorm how you can ensure a wider reach for your content.
This is an important part and impossible to miss out on because creating awesome content won’t make a difference if it’s not in front of the audience. For your efforts to yield results, your content needs to be visible, and so content promotion needs to be prioritized as much as content creation.
Not Keeping Up With Trends #
While creating evergreen content that helps your target audience solve their problems is ideal, keeping up with trends is also essential to stay relevant. The audience participates in trends, and keeping up with them means that you’re listening to them and adopting new strategies.
You cannot use the same strategy repeatedly, because content marketing is always evolving. It requires you to assess gaps, make peace with new technologies, and keep up with trends to stay relevant along with being result-driven.
Not keeping up with these trends would give your competitors an edge over you. Every customer you come across will want to associate themselves with brands working on themselves in new and improved ways. You can help customers all you want, but you won’t stick for long unless you listen to them and form your brand on those values.
Let’s look at some emerging content marketing trends that you can include in your strategy:
Videos are taking the front seat #
It’s no surprise that the most prominent brands are now allocating their budget to videos, both shot, and stock. This is because of one very simple reason- videos keep the audience hooked and engaged for a more extended period than any other form of content. You can publish your content on various platforms like social media, YouTube, your website, and Video.
Moreover, you don’t always have to shoot videos. You can interview an expert on a live stream, host webinar and workshops, and do Q&A to interact with the audience. When you show your face on a screen, the audience gets to know about the person behind the brand.
So, to engage with your audience more and humanize your brand, videos are a must! Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz is doing a great job at videos.
User-generated content is becoming a hit #
User-Generated Content or UGC is the content created by your customers and fans about your brand without paying them. According to research, over 83% of people trust other customers’ content than the brand itself.
When you share their content, they feel special, and it starts a loop for word of mouth as a result of which more people start creating this content. Moreover, it invites new customers because it acts as social proof and what’s better than customers showing their satisfaction on social media. The most significant part about it is that it creates a community, and turns followers into customers.
Original diagram for Techfastly by Vin Patel.
Conversational marketing is evolving What’s better to understand your audience and customers than talking to them directly?
We live in an age where chatbots are ruling but with robotic answers that do not give customers a personalized experience even though it helps them.
Today, when there’s a lot of competition around, the need to understand your audience’s concerns about your brand, product, or service is greater than ever. You can practice conversational marketing by using human scripts or real-time conversations in chatbots to assist customers.
Original diagram for Techfastly by Vin Patel.
Influence marketing is making strides on social media In 2020, there’s been a massive increase in the number of influences online. There has also been a corresponding rise in their fan following, given the unique content creation these influences from diverse fields are bringing to the table.
Moreover, 73% of marketers have a budget allocated for influence marketing, which tells us how much potential it holds.
Influences have the power to show people certain products and brands by endorsing them so that their massive audience is convinced to buy or at least give the product a chance. This acts as social proof, and everyone wants to use the brand that a social media influence is using, right?
It’s a win-win situation. Various other trends are gearing to take the front seat in content marketing like voice search, interactive content, automated content etc. Adapting to these trends means being updated, and there’s always brownie points for that!
Not Paying Attention to CTAs #
One of the most common content marketing mistakes is not paying attention to your lead generation auto-machine, your Call-to-Action buttons.
You can create the most awesome content in your industry, but if you don’t tell the audience what to do after reading the content, you’re making a blunder, but don’t worry, we can fix that!
Wherever you are creating content, be it on social media, emails, your website, or podcast- you need to tell your audience what they should do very clearly.
- Do you want them to share your content?
- Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter or sign up for your course?
- Do you want them to book a call with you?
Whatever is your end goal, it needs to be communicated very clearly and explicitly.
Here are some things to keep in mind when it comes to CTAs:
- Use contrasting colors for CTA on your website to make them very evident.
- Highlight CTAs multiple times across the course of your website and content.
- Don’t turn around words. Make it straight cut.
- Use an innovative approach for CTA copy like ‘Sign up for awesomeness’ instead of ‘Sign up now.’
- Repeat your offer in different ways across channels.
- Strategically place your CTA along the reader’s natural reading path.
- Make the buttons optimized for both mobile and laptop.
- Practice A/B testing because, with CTA, a slight change can bring a higher click-through rate if only you pay attention to it and keep experimenting.
CTAs can never be perfect, but paying attention to them and tweaking them in between courses can generate a lot of difference.
ReferralCandy Blog has a great list of CTA examples you can look up to for inspiration.
Not Tracking Performance #
Every strategy requires analysis, and content marketing is no different. Imagine spending months executing a plan and not analyzing what results it brought you or if the strategy was right for your brand.
Analyzing your performance tells you about the gaps or challenges you faced in execution or strategy to determine how you can fill them up next time.
Data plays an important role here, and if you hate numbers, you may want to fall in love with them for this part because this data determines your brand position in the market.
Say, you find that Instagram is performing well in terms of carousel content while videos are performing well on LinkedIn, you can tweak your strategy to focus on these platforms more and create more of this content. If you don’t analyze it, you could be focusing on Facebook when it hasn’t been working all this while.
Therefore, it’s imperative that your team reviews your marketing performance in intervals to ensure you’re going in the right direction.
Here’s what you should analyze: Website traffic The amount of traffic you’re driving to your website says a lot about how your content performs. You can use Google Analytic to track the source of your website traffic.
This will help you understand which platform generates the most traffic and what type of content or optimization supports the increase in traffic. This is important because the more people visit your website, the higher your chances are at converting them.
Social shares Social media accounts for a significant part of your content marketing strategy. Analyzing the number of shares your audience is making tells you if they like your content and if it’s relatable enough for them to share it with their network.
This will also give you an idea about what type of content is performing better on which platform so you can create more or less of that after tweaking your strategy. You can use Hootsuite to analyze social shares.
Conversions and sales You can analyze conversions by looking at the number of people who respond to your CTA and buy your product/service, book your call or sign up to your email list. This measure is important to track as it says a lot about how you’ve been performing collectively as a brand, irrespective of your digital presence or marketing efforts. You can use Google Analytic and as per the analysis, you can reform certain things to increase the conversion rate.
If you start analyzing everything in your strategy execution, it will take a lot of time. So, it’s best to define your KPIs beforehand to know what you need to focus on for achieving your goals.
Failing to measure results will not bring you growth, because then you’ll be following a stagnant content strategy. Results come when you analyze results, acknowledge success and failure, and reform gaps to make the plan better and your campaigns more effective.
At the end of the day, everyone wants to focus on how many conversions did you generate and where did those conversions come from. This makes it one of the most important reasons to analyze your efforts.
Wrapping It Up #
If you’re investing your resources in a timeless marketing strategy like content marketing, you cannot afford to make mistakes. The key is planning!
Plan for your worst-case scenarios and maintain agility to include spontaneous campaigns and content buckets if need be for trend jacking and moment marketing. When you’ve carefully planned your strategy, there’s no chance of messing it up.
Keep these 8 mistakes in mind while formulating your strategy and take notes from content marketing resources to be up to date with trends. With content marketing, consistency and patience are important because it’s a long-term game, and you cannot expect overnight results.
Rushing in implementing your strategy or being a part of the rat race makes a brand prone to these mistakes.
Don’t run; content marketing is here to stay.
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