Content marketing is one of the best long-term investments a company can make, as long as it’s executed correctly. It can help increase traffic and bring top-notch leads back to your organization.
A survey by the Content Marketing Institute found that 92% of marketers say that their company views content as a business asset. As a result, it’s important that marketers do everything they can to maximize the ROI of their content marketing efforts.
It’s a crowded market, and with more and more businesses and individuals working remotely due to Covid-19, there is an even greater necessity to stand out online. This leaves little room for mistakes and missed opportunities. In order to achieve optimal results, here are 8 content marketing mistakes and how to avoid them:
1. Not Conducting Research Beforehand
The key to any good piece of content is connecting with your target audience and giving them something of value. Your content should provide valuable insight or takeaways, solve a problem or resonate with your audience.
Jumping into content without first researching who your audience even is can leave you missing the mark completely. If you don’t know your audience, how can you provide meaningful content to them?
How to avoid: research your target audience. Discover who they are, what problems and pain-points exist for them and the topics they care about to help craft your content.
2. Failing to Establish Goals or Identify Key KPIs
Before you create content, it’s important to establish goals you want your content to achieve and identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure success. This helps keep your content focused and organized, as well as ensuring that your content serves a purpose to both your target audience and your organization.
Setting clear KPIs for your content also helps you analyze what to improve for the future. For example, if the goal of your content is lead generation, then your KPIs would include metrics such as form submissions, downloads or follow-up calls.
How to avoid: understand the “why” factor behind your content, what you hope to achieve and how you’ll measure the results to keep content valuable for your organization and end-users alike.
3. Publishing Content for the Sake of Publishing
The content marketing landscape is a competitive one, which means that you must deliver high-quality and relevant content in order to break through the noise and deliver long-term results. Publishing content just for the sake of publishing is one of the biggest content marketing mistakes to avoid.
You must first think about your target audience and your organization’s messaging. Content that doesn’t align with your messaging, is irrelevant to your audience, or doesn’t provide value could be considered poor-quality content.
How to avoid: it’s crucial that you build content around what your organization represents and what your target audience wants to see. This comes through establishing goals for your content and doing your research to know who you’re providing content for. Delivering content that is inconsistent with your brand or doesn’t match your messaging can negatively sway end-users.
4. Forgetting your CTA or Followup
The point of content marketing is to connect with end-users, build relationships with them and generate new leads. Additionally, all content should include logical next steps for your end-user to follow.
Failing to provide next steps means your content could fall flat and leave potential leads on the table. It’s important to include a CTA (call to action) or a follow-up plan to provide that logical next step.
Establishing a path that you want leads to follow won’t guarantee that they’ll take it, but it does help make it easier for those that are interested to connect with your brand and become quality leads. Having the right follow-up plan for those that may be interested but not quite ready to commit allows you to keep in touch so you’re there when they are ready.
How to avoid: Think about the path you want potential leads to take and use that when determining your CTA or follow-up plan. Do you want them to call your team for advice or help with their next project? Provide a phone number or submission form. Do you want them to sign-up for your weekly newsletter? Provide information and a link to sign up.
5. Ignoring SEO
Since your content is accessible online, it’s important to consider search engine optimization (SEO). Including best SEO practices in your content helps engage readers and gives it a good chance of showing up in their search results.
How to avoid: make sure to add structure to your writing. This includes headings and subheadings, descriptive titles and URLs, and adding relevant images that correlate with your content.
6. Having No Plan for Outreach or Promotion
You might get lucky and have people stumble across your content, but simply publishing content is not enough. In order to gain traction and get your content in front of as many people as possible, it’s important to promote it.
Think about how you’ll promote your content and where it would have the most impact as you establish an outreach and promotion plan. There are many places to promote content, but you need to make sure your target audience will see it.
How to avoid: understanding your target audience is key when creating your outreach and promotion plan. Figure out where they consume the majority of their content and how they interact with content. Knowing the answers to these questions helps get your content in front of the people that matter most.
7. Letting Content Become Stagnant
Another common content marketing mistake is promoting content only once and then letting it become stagnant. Content marketing and SEO is all about relevant, quality content that provides value.
How to avoid: continue to update your content after publishing. You can also help keep your content from going stagnant by focusing on evergreen topics that aren’t limited by time. You will still have to revisit and update content as needed, but you won’t have to worry about your content becoming outdated when the news cycle changes.
8. Giving up Too Early
It’s important to remember that content marketing is a long-term strategy, which means having expectations of your content “going viral” or seeing instant results is a big mistake. It may seem like we hear about content going viral all the time, but in reality, less than 1% of content goes viral.
How to avoid: don’t evaluate the success or failure of your content marketing on whether it instantly achieves viral status. With the appropriate outreach and promotion plan, as well as the other tips provided throughout this blog, you can help tailor your marketing to produce consistent, long-term results.
Interested in learning more about common marketing mistakes and how you can avoid them? Let’s talk about how a member of the marketing support team at Jennasis can help you create the perfect content marketing plan to adjust to the current demands of business adaptations across the world.
