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5 Common Content Marketing Mistakes (and How To Avoid Them)

When it comes to your content marketing strategy, it’s essential […]

Content Marketing Trends

When it comes to your content marketing strategy, it’s essential to avoid making common mistakes that drive away readers. If your content fails to engage them and keep their interest, it won’t produce the conversions you’re looking for. 

It’s no secret that content is king and reigns supreme. A staggering 89 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing to grow their brands and produce conversions. But that doesn’t only include blog posts. You can create stellar content on your website that informs users about your brand, moves them through the sales funnel, and generates leads.

However, it isn’t as simple as creating content, uploading it, and watching the conversions stroll in. You need to ensure you aren’t making the same mistakes as other content marketers so your business is the one on top.

If you want to avoid common content marketing mistakes, here are five to get started..

Lack of Strategy

If you have all these great ideas for your content but don’t have a strategy to flesh them out, you’ll quickly run into problems. All successful marketing campaigns have a strategy that takes them from step one to step two to see fruitful results. Haphazardly piecing content together fails to create a cohesive content plan and drive traffic to your site.

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as brainstorming an idea, writing, publishing, and watching the conversions roll in. You need to use data and website analytics to gauge what content performs best with readers and what content to stay away from.

Spying on your competitors also helps you figure out your content marketing strategy. You can look at their best-performing content to get an idea of how those topics would perform on your website or blog. Pay attention to content that drives ROI and engagement so you can go back to those ideas when you’re ready.

It’s easier to follow a solid content marketing strategy when you have goals in place. SMART goals simplify your to-dos and create actionable steps to follow so you see results. 

SMART goals are:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Realistic
  • Time-based

SMART goals work well for content planning because they turn vague ideas into specific, realistic, actionable ones. They force you to set up your strategy with a timeline so there’s an urgency to produce high-quality content for your audience. 

Not Understanding Your Audience 

With any marketing strategy, you need to understand your target market at a fundamental level if you want to reach your goals. Without understanding your audience’s motivations, it’s impossible to gauge what problems they need your brand to solve. If your content doesn’t provide solutions, then it’ll be challenging to cultivate a loyal readership.

So, you need to figure out your audience. Without knowing their interests, needs, and pain points, your content will fail to keep them engaged. You can create buyer personas to gather user information in one place so it’s easy to understand your customers.

Buyer personas include important information such as age, location, income, buying behaviors, education level, and more. They’re important for any marketing strategy because they help you visualize your ideal customer and create campaigns centered around their needs. 

content marketing

Looking at information about your audience helps you brainstorm content ideas that provide them with value. It also helps you personalize their experiences on your website.

To create buyer personas, you need to dig up information on your target market so you can create relevant content for them. You can:

  • Send surveys to existing customers and collect their feedback
  • Spy on your competitors’ audience and gather their information
  • Scour social media to see what people are saying about your industry
  • Optimize lead capture forms to ensure you’re asking the right questions

Failing to Provide Value

There are several reasons why someone may stumble upon your content, but what’s more important is how to keep them there. When someone clicks a link to your website, they’re looking for something, whether that’s pure entertainment or a solution to their problem. If you fail to provide them with value, they’ll turn the other away.

Your content must not only cater to its audience but also provide insight and relevance. If your content exists to sit on the internet and collect cobwebs, it won’t do you much good.

When a new visitor comes to your site, you need to make a positive, lasting impression so they want to return. If they feel that your content doesn’t give them what they’re looking for or meet their expectations, they’ll turn to your competitors.

You can provide value by creating evergreen content on your blog. Evergreen content stays relevant over a long period so it’s easy to link back to and build conversions. It’s also easy to maintain since it doesn’t need constant updates.

Evergreen content includes but isn’t limited to:

  • Original research
  • Case studies
  • How-to guides
  • Best or worst practices

Because this information stays relevant over long periods, it’s easier to drive traffic to your site and build backlinks. People can continue visiting and learning from it until further notice, making it highly valuable and sought after.

Using Only Text 

When you think of content marketing, do you only picture text filling up your website? If so, you need to change your perception of what content is and can be for your business. The more you open your mind to the possibilities, the more creative you’ll be to entice visitors and keep them around.

Adding visual mediums to your content, especially video and images, can do wonders for your conversions. One company saw a 60 percent returning customer rate after implementing video to its content marketing strategy. It’s also been proven that articles with images receive 94 percent more views than those with no visuals. 

These webpages don’t only receive more interaction because they include visuals, but also because they make it easier to learn. Many people are visual learners, and switching it up with different mediums lets them soak in the information, making it easier to remember.

Don’t underestimate what different mediums of content can do for your audience and how much they can impact your conversions. When you stumble across a website or blog post, do you feel excited to read paragraph after paragraph? Probably not, and your audience isn’t either.

When creating content for your site, think of ways you can spice it up. The more creative and unique you are, the easier it’ll be to drive traffic to your website and build a loyal following. Think of relevant infographics, videos, and images you can incorporate into your content marketing to boost interest and engagement.

Neglecting SEO

Did you know that the domains that pop up on the second page of SERPs attract only five percent of search traffic? That means if your site doesn’t show on the first page of search results, most users won’t see it or be able to engage with it. 

Marketers who create content without SEO in mind are setting themselves up for failure. With so much pre-existing content out there, you need to prove that your content deserves to appear high in search results.

Search engine optimization ensures that your target audience finds your content so it drives traffic to your website. Blogging is a surefire way to provide customers value and encourage them to stick around. Websites with blog content have 434 percent more search engine-indexed webpages, which boosts your brand visibility.

Use keyword research to make sure you’re publishing content that’s relevant and interesting to your readers. Knowing the terms and phrases they’re searching gives you valuable insight into what they’re looking for and what problems they need to solve. It also helps to optimize your webpages for higher rankings since organic results receive 94 percent more clicks compared to paid advertising.

Google Keyword Planner is a great resource for finding long-tail keywords that rank high in search engines and low in the competition so you have a better chance of appearing on the first page of SERPs.

Sample-search-Google-Adwords-Keyword-Planner

Back to You

Creating and maintaining a solid content marketing strategy is crucial to generating leads, building an email list, and product sales, and cultivating a strong relationship with your audience. However, there are ways to spice up your content that are sure to bring your site more visitors and engagement. How will you avoid common content mistakes in your marketing strategy?