Understand & overcome the common content marketing mistakes every marketer makes. Learn them all and enhance the ROI from your Content Marketing Campaign.
Content marketing is one of the most effective strategies offered today to grow online businesses.
Does content marketing for you? mean to write a few thousands of words articles several times a week and curate into the different form of content?
I guess “NO.”
At the time of creating and promoting your content, marketers make mistakes. And resultant to that you do not achieve your goals.
In this article, I am going to explain the top content marketing mistakes that every marketer makes (including myself) while creation and promotion of content.
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Content Marketing Mistakes that Every Marketer Makes
- Mistake #1. Sticking To Just One Medium
- Mistake #2. Have Plan But Not A Single Action To Implement It (or vice versa)
- Mistake #3. Not Fully Grasp What Your Audience Want From You
- Mistake #4. The myth of Content Publishing is Content Marketing
- Mistake #5. Solely Hypothetical Buyer Personas
- Mistake #6. The expectation of Quick Results
- Mistake #7. Trying To Put Lots Efforts To Publish Content
- Mistake #8. Low-Quality Content
- Mistake #9. Targeting Only on SEO
- Mistake #10. Playing Slavish To Best Practice
- Mistake #11. Trying Too Hard To Sell
Content Marketing Mistakes that Every Marketer Makes
Mistake #1. Sticking To Just One Medium
You may hear that it is best just to stick to the one type of content, like blog posts and do that one thing extremely well.
It is good, but you shouldn’t get stuck in one forever. There are literally over a dozen of content types that you can include for your online content.
Below is the list of that medium that you can include in your content:
- Infographics
- Videos
- Downloadable PDFs
- Slide Decks
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Online courses
- Checklists
- Whitepapers
- Short Rants
- How to Guides
- Animations
- Social Media Posts
- eBooks
- Case Studies
- Live Streaming Presentations
All these mediums have their appeal. So, go beyond a blog post and utilize multiple different mediums to repurpose your blog content and appeal to different types of readers or learners or audience.
Mistake #2. Have Plan But Not A Single Action To Implement It (or vice versa)
Having a master plan for content marketing is one of the effective strategies for content marketing efforts.
Like to know what your targeted audience wants via community forums, gaining insight, and find how you can customize your communications to meet your audience needs.
But making the only master plan won’t help you. You should start working on your strategy to achieve your plan.
To achieve your plan, it is important that you first set your goal, which should be SMART that means specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time-based.
Once you established that goal, you can start working ahead to achieve your strategy.
Mistake #3. Not Fully Grasp What Your Audience Want From You
A study conducted by IBM says that there are 63% of customers who don’t feel understood by the brands they love.
Then the research has done that explains the significant difference between what companies or business want to talk about and what the audience wants to hear from them.
To not knowing what your audience wants from you, it can destroy all your content marketing efforts.
Doesn’t matter how much time and effort you have spent building your landing page if you have come up with something that your audience doesn’t want.
So avoid creating content which is irrelevant to your customer and try to know your customers’ mind and find what kind of content, how and when they like to see or read.
And concentrate on creating and promoting your content that attracts the right audience. But make sure that your content should be all about your customer.
Mistake #4. The myth of Content Publishing is Content Marketing
The quickest way to destroy your content marketing is to do nothing after you publish your content.
There are some of the marketers who think that content marketing is just publishing the content, that’s it. But that just a myth not right way of content marketing.
Publishing content is only part of content marketing. The other half part is to promote your content.
If publishing content is the first principal component of content marketing then promoting content is the second main component of it.
So content promotion is as important as content publishing.
There are a few traditional ways of promoting content:
- Social media channels
- Forums
- Blogs
- Other marketing channels
Mistake #5. Solely Hypothetical Buyer Personas
Most of you have known the importance of creating a buyer persona, but before that, you must know what your customers’ motivations are and what they actually want from you, then you can create a thorough buyer persona.
To create it three ways can help you:
- First start surveying your customer’s goals, their journey that brought them to you, their hesitations before purchasing, their concerns about your product or your industry, any preconceived notions. At least prepare 10-12 list questions of this survey.
- Instead of emailing, try to make a phone call or execute in-person interviews to gain additional insight into their goals.
- You can also use survey pop-ups that ask your customers about their experience of purchasing your product. There are certain tools available that help you in such surveys as Qualaroo or Survicate.
Mistake #6. The expectation of Quick Results
Another content marketing mistakes we do is the expectation of quick results.
There are many marketers out there who expect an immediate result and expect to see an increased ROI quickly.
But content marketing requires efforts, and it takes time. So don’t expect result in a matter of a few weeks or even a few months.
Just give your content time to gain tractions and deliver organic results. Because content marketing is a marathon, it isn’t a sprint.
So keep creating good quality content and wait to see results.
Mistake #7. Trying To Put Lots Efforts To Publish Content
Another tip to avoid content marketing mistakes is to start publishing content on familiar channels.
There is a myth that publishing content on a different platform like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, podcasts, webinars, and many other platforms will benefit them.
Yes, each platform is beneficial in their ways. But trying to input lots of efforts to publish content on all these channels could be very costly and time-consuming.
So instead of hitting all the channels pick a couple of channels to start with, and once you win an audience base, you can jump over to the rest of it.
Mistake #8. Low-Quality Content
One of the popular content marketing mistakes novice blogger do is producing low-quality content.
Many of the content marketers who create content only for the purpose of SEO and also some you might be creating that kind of content as well.
But do you ever think building a content which has a high search ranking but that is no benefit to anyone, then what good is the content that you create?
Good and quality content should contain one of these three things:
- It should inform readers of the new situation developing.
- Through the content, teach your readers something that they didn’t know before.
- Provide your readers with an opinion of a particular situation or product.
- If the content does not contain any one of these three things, your readers will see it as a crappy content and will lose the interest to read further content on your platform.
- So if you have quality content, it will affect how your readers are likely to stay on your website or blog.
Mistake #9. Targeting Only on SEO
Don’t get me wrong; SEO is of course very important. In fact, the search is the one that helps you to drive traffic to your website or blog.
But a problem arises when your primary goal is only creating content that achieves high search ranking, another popular content marketing mistakes blogger do.
When this happens, content can quickly become all about targeting keywords, instead focusing on what your audience or readers want. At its worst, SEO can even mess up your overall content marketing strategy.
So instead of focusing primary keyword optimization, you should write in-depth content that covers every angle of your subject.
For that, you need to figure out which board themes your audience wants to know about. Then find out related topics and keywords on which you can build entire content or add into your content.
Mistake #10. Playing Slavish To Best Practice
Many of the marketers think that there is a schedule for in digital marketing world like tweet someone, sending emails, posting content and for some other things.
Just because the successful marketers follow this schedule, and this is the best practice for them and yes it is safe too. But doesn’t it seem really odd to you to do what everyone else is doing?
Remember that playing safe you can’t invent something new. So to get a great result, try to take some risks.
Mistake #11. Trying Too Hard To Sell
One of the biggest content marketing mistake that marketers make is hard selling off their content.
Just because they want to see the fast result and think that utilizing content is the best way to get short term ROI. But that’s totally wrong.
To get a high ROI, you should first help your audience instead of selling your content.
Create content with providing valuable information, to the point where your company becomes valued, trusted and identified with being useful.
So when it times to make a purchase, your business is the obvious choice.
If you have been making these content marketing mistakes, even if it’s been for years, don’t worry!
Because content marketing is a long-term strategy, and you have still time to comprise them.
Have any content marketing mistakes to add to this list? Share it in the comments. I would happy to add that in my list along with your name.
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