Content marketing remains one of the most powerful forms of digital marketing. Of course, it’s constantly evolving, and it’s important to remember that this category includes a lot more than blog posts or articles. A robust content marketing strategy should incorporate various written forms, as well as visual and even audio formats like infographics, images, video, podcasts, and so on.
When it’s well executed, content marketing does so much to increase your brand awareness and authority, build your following, improve the value and user experience on your website and social media pages, boost your search engine optimization (SEO), foster customer loyalty, and more.
But the following common content marketing mistakes easily undermine your efforts. They can make it seem like content marketing is ineffective—a waste of time and money, even. If you get acquainted with them, though, and manage to steer clear, you’re likely to experience all sorts of benefits. Just be attentive and patient, remembering that results don’t manifest overnight.
Typical Content Marketing Mistakes
- You haven’t spent enough time defining your target market, so you don’t really know who you’re writing for or what they’re most interested in
- You haven’t developed your content marketing strategy from the right perspective, so you aren’t providing material your target audience cares about
- You don’t create, publish, or promote new original content consistently
- Your content isn’t professionally produced or edited, containing quality-related problems with spelling, grammar, concision, clarity, etc. that turn readers off and undermine your credibility
- You start making individual pieces of content without a solid grasp of what you want them to achieve
- You aren’t creating original content for people at all stages of the buyer’s journey to successfully usher them along your sales funnel
- Your content doesn’t provide any genuine value for your readers or viewers
- Your content is too often or too overtly self-promotional
- Your content doesn’t fit your brand personality or communicate the way your audience expects you to
- Your content is boring
- You don’t come across as a trustworthy expert
- You don’t create each new piece of content on one narrowly focused topic
- Your content doesn’t have attention-grabbing, keyworded headlines that let the reader know exactly what they get if they read on or watch it
- You don’t use long-tail keywords in your content
- Your content isn’t mostly evergreen (relevant indefinitely, or at least for a long time), but instead is topical or otherwise becomes quickly dated
- You don’t experiment with your content and strategy
- You’re not up on current SEO best practices for blog posts and articles
- You rely on obsolete SEO tactics that don’t help you get found via search, and that can in fact get your pages penalized by search engines and annoy your audience
- You don’t close each piece of content with a clear, compelling, relevant call-to-action
- You don’t focus on writing for both search engines and human readers
- You don’t solicit relevant guest blogging opportunities to get your brand name and your content in front of new members of your target audience
- You don’t offer guest blogging opportunities to relevant industry influencers to reach their audience and bolster your organization’s credibility
- You aren’t writing different types of original content that can boost your SEO, offer greater value and better user experiences, and further develop your brand authority (including those mentioned in the link, as well as whitepapers, e-books, video, infographics, podcasts, etc.)
- You don’t use thoughtfully chosen, high-quality images with your written content that get people’s attention, encourage click-throughs, and make your posts more likely to be shared
- You don’t share your content on social media or enact other strategies to promote it
- You don’t tailor the way you share your content to each particular social media platform (e.g., using tags, hashtags, multiple images, tweaking introductory text, etc.)
- You aren’t closely monitoring your analytics and results to figure out what your audience likes, what it doesn’t like, and how you can create more appealing materials
- You don’t pay attention to whether the people reading your content are turning into leads and converting to sales
- You don’t pay attention to other simple ways to determine whether your content strategy is working
- You haven’t thoroughly integrated your content marketing efforts with your email marketing, social media marketing, digital advertising, and other marketing strategies to create synergy
