Content marketing is one of the most viable investments for organizations of all sizes and a surefire way to grow your following and customer base. The issue is that many businesses underestimate its complexity and commit a series of mistakes along the way.
Some become too self-centered and sound too salesy, and others produce content that is hard to read and isn’t fit for search engine optimization. And that’s totally fine, nobody’s content strategy is perfect.
In this article, we’ll talk about a series of mistakes businesses make in content marketing, so you don’t have to. Let’s dive right in, shall we?
1. Not understanding what your readership is into
Very often, a company’s content marketing strategy will be in total dissonance with its positioning and its readership’s expectations of it. This is among the most widespread issues in content marketing.
“The more, the better” isn’t really an ideal principle for content. Aimless content isn’t enticing to the customer. We’re living in an attention economy; we value our time, we don’t want to read watered down blog posts that have just been rewritten from some other niche website on the web.
To keep your customers happy, we need to understand what they want. Therefore, it’s absolutely imperative that your content strategy is data-oriented. Here are a few things that’ll improve the efficiency of your content marketing:
- Have a detailed customer persona. Use multiple sources of data like questionnaires and website traffic data to understand what they’re most interested in;
- Monitor comments and engagements. This’ll provide you with a lot of insight on what topics and kinds of content they find most engaging;
- Analyze your market. When entering a specific niche, you need to be mindful of the businesses that have been there before you. It’s essential to find a section of the market that isn’t covered by them, or, alternatively, a class of customer that they aren’t targeting. Calibrate your content marketing strategy accordingly;
- Study the number of backlinks your articles have. That’s an excellent indicator of acceptance from customers and industry-specific influencers.
A recent study indicates that 55% of people that receive content from brands think that it lacks relevance.
“Understanding your customers is costly, in terms of money and time — but it’s absolutely essential for an efficient content marketing strategy. The spray-and-pray approach has been a content marketing staple for years and it’s been severely overused in the past — your clientele deserves better.” — Daria Amundsen, marketing specialist at Best Essay.
2. Not distributing curated content
Content curation is a phenomenon that many businesses have been skipping on for a very long time for many reasons. Some believe that promoting the content of other companies is counter-productive; some are simply too self-centered even to consider this option. Yet it’s important to mention that in the modern business ecosystem, organizations should first and foremost focus on the value that they provide their readership with.
Your clientele inherently expects you to provide them with relevant articles or videos that will make them more knowledgeable in a particular field. Focusing on advertising your services over and over again will only cause your followers’ frustration and will defeat the purpose of increasing your sales.
Here are a few actionable tips on how to curate content like a pro:
- Have a framework. It’s essential to have a strategy for content curation. Start by establishing how much content you want to curate. Since curation has become such an important component of content marketing, there’s some research you might find useful.
- Establish the best sources. Find the best and most relevant sources to publish content from. Make sure that these businesses’ reputation is spotless and that the data is fact-checked.
- Establish what the best channels for content curation are. Some marketing channels are more suitable for content distribution than others. By taking a careful look at your analytics, you’ll find out which of your social media platforms are the most suitable for distributing content. Also, consider chatbots as a means for content distribution.
Aside from diversifying your content strategy with curated articles and videos, specialists recommend that you don’t promote your brand way too much in the material that you publish to your site or social media. Consider mentioning your products and services every three or four posts.
3. Creating just one content type
Many businesses mistakenly equate content to blogs or articles, but it’s essential to step away from this faulty definition. As a result, this reliance on text-based content causes many customers to be bored with the content they’re exposed to on a regular basis.
Content marketing should be all-encompassing. We’re living in an attention economy. It takes more than just bland articles to entice our customers. Businesses should focus on creating rich content as well — having good sources for the images they use in their articles, creating informative and engaging videos, recording podcasts that provide their clientele with valuable data, and so forth.
Besides just creating multiple types of content, you can repurpose your older material into infographics, for example. People are fond of rich content because it’s much, much easier to consume. Research suggests that humans process visual data 60,000 times faster than text, which is a central reason why infographics and videos are so enticing to modern-day users.
Respectively, rather than just posting bland blog posts to your website and social media, try diversifying your content with high-quality images, informative videos, consider repurposing some old content to create infographics.
Similarly, don’t hesitate to switch up writers and editors once in a while. Experienced editors can introduce a more user-friendly tone to your articles. There are now tools and services like Hemingway, Grab My Essay, Grammarly, and Studicus that can help you with writing and editing your pieces in a specific tone and voice.
Conclusion
Content marketing is a central component in a business’s online presence, which is essential to drive traffic and clientele to your site. However, it’s safe to say that content marketing works in different degrees, depending on how well you execute it.
By avoiding the mistakes you’ve seen above, you’ll maximize your chances of creating a solid content marketing strategy.
To recap:
- Invest time in studying the behavior and preferences of your customers.
- Find great niche content from other players in the field and share it with your customers. Show your customers that what you value is their satisfaction, not pushing your product.
3. Make your content visually appealing and diverse by introducing some rich content.