- The priority of content marketing is giving helpful solutions to questions that potential customers are searching for online.
- Define your target audience’s struggles and issues — design your content to address these issues.
- Focus on generating material that will assist people in solving problems or enhancing their lives rather than over-selling your items or services.
- Research keywords and employ SEO best practices to help your content rank naturally in search engines and algorithms.
Content marketing has a reputation for being one of the most cost-effective and efficient methods to grow your company. A content marketing strategy may help you enhance your SEO results, establish industry expertise, and attract more customers if done right. However, you’re not alone if you’ve spent countless hours on content marketing and aren’t getting returns.
Unfortunately, far too many companies do it wrong. You’ve read, downloaded, and subscribed to a plethora of checklists, white pages, even clever podcasts and newsletters on the issue. Despite this, you’re undoubtedly making the same mistakes as so many others who are attempting content marketing.
We’re not judging. We’ve made all of these mistakes, and we’re sure we’ll make some in the future. Here are six common content marketing blunders and how to avoid them.
But first…
Why should you invest in content marketing?
Content marketing is like hiring salespeople who work around the clock to assist your customers while they are searching for you.
Content marketing is a method of giving helpful solutions to queries that potential consumers are searching for online. When those clients are ready to buy, they will (hopefully) come to you. It is essential that you remember this purpose when developing your content plans.
A properly implemented content marketing strategy can generate the vast majority of your website traffic and lead to higher conversion counts and a steady revenue stream.
With that in mind, these are common mistakes to avoid in your content marketing strategy.
Nonexistent content marketing strategy
Are you the sort of blogger that writes whenever inspiration strikes? While there’s nothing wrong with writing a spontaneous blog post now and then, failing to have a strong strategy for what you’re writing and why will almost always result in poor results.
You should clarify your overall content marketing strategy by creating a content schedule. It will also help you consider the subjects you want to address to ensure that they are both useful and relevant to your target audience. Preparing your schedule for at least a month (3 months is advised) ahead of time will keep you from rushing for ideas at the last minute, and it will make it less likely that you will skip a post due to a lack of time.
A quick note on SEO roadmaps
SEO roadmaps are necessary for achieving any SEO marketing objectives. They establish a task priority hierarchy, show how deliverables fit into the broader plan, and provide the team a general idea of which projects to focus on. Consider an SEO roadmap to be a strategic plan that keeps all SEO-related operations on track, avoids mistakes, and helps you make better decisions. With some minor adjustments, you can tweak the standard SEO roadmap to focus on your content marketing initiatives.
Here’s an in-depth look at why you should use an SEO roadmap.
Ignoring the competition
No successful content marketing strategy is made in a vacuum. You will always compete with others for search engine rankings, and competition is fierce! Look at competitors to determine which blog pieces are bringing in the most traffic. Then, one by one, examine these top-performing posts to discover what it would take to outrank a rival in search engine results pages (SERPs) for their specific blog topic.
We ask ourselves the following questions as part of our analysis:
- What is the length of these articles?
- Would reading this article provide me with everything I needed to know about this subject?
- How many backlinks are pointing to these articles?
While you want to prevent copying, it’s a good idea to research your competitors and see what readers and search engines are reacting positively to.
Not defining your audience
A report from IBM/Econsultancy found that 90% of marketers agree that personalizing the customer experience is critical to their success. However, there is a significant disconnect between what businesses believe about their clients and what they actually desire.
If you’re constantly producing excellent content but still haven’t seen any results, it’s possible that you’re not connecting with your audience. You’re wasting your time, no matter how amazing your material is, if your audience doesn’t care.
Developed buyer personas are insufficient. Instead, you’ll need to go into your audience’s mindset to connect with them genuinely. Consider sending out questionnaires and utilizing social media to discover more about your target audience’s personal struggles and issues. Once you have this knowledge, you can start designing your content to address these issues. This is the key to producing excellent and shareable content.
Start your content marketing strategy by asking the following questions:
- Who is this article’s intended audience?
- What information does this article need to have for them to find what they’re looking for?
- What benefit does this reader provide to your company?
- What value does this article provide your reader?
Your posts are too sales-y
Nobody enjoys being sold to! In content marketing, hard-selling seldom works. If your content is overly aggressive with sales, your readers will abandon you.
You may be urged to create content that “pushes the bottom line.” You may want to see results as soon as possible and feel that employing content with a more rapid acquisition hook or more prominent CTAs is the best approach to achieve a quick return on investment.
But that isn’t why your readers came to your blog in the first place.
They wanted to see content that helps them to do their job, makes them better people, and/or solves their problems.
While we appreciate the desire to increase conversions and income, we don’t believe that over-selling your company’s products or services in a piece of informative, top-of-the-funnel content is a good idea.
Focus on generating material that will assist people in solving problems or enhancing their lives rather than over-selling your items or services. This is the most effective approach to establish trust and credibility while also assuring that your audience will return for more.
Forgetting SEO
Around 93% of all web traffic is via a search engine; investing in SEO should be your top priority when starting to build your brand. Nobody enjoys content that is crammed with keywords. However, if you don’t pay attention to SEO at all, there’s a high possibility your material will go unnoticed.
Spend some time researching keywords and employing SEO best practices to help your content rank naturally in search engines and algorithms. Not only does SEO help you get discovered on internet search engines like Google, but following social media SEO best practices, like using relevant hashtags on Instagram, can help your content get discovered by new audiences interested in seeing more!
There are some fundamentals you want to get down (see this beginner’s guide to technical SEO for a DIY approach to this). But this brings us to our last mistake.
Ignoring outside experts
SEO produces more leads than any other marketing endeavor, according to 61% of B2B marketers. Therefore you have to ask yourself: can your company afford to lose out on your greatest potential sales tool while learning how to plan and implement your content marketing strategy?
If not, then fill out our contact form to see what it would look like to partner with us.
If yes, then why not subscribe to our quarterly newsletter and see what we recommend doing to build a content marketing strategy and ensure that you’re the first to know about our newest content marketing insights.
