There isn’t a company today that doesn’t rely on content marketing to increase brand awareness, enhance customer engagement, and convert prospective clients. And while content marketing is a highly effective approach for achieving these goals, there are several marketing mistakes that you need to steer clear of if you want to ensure your efforts are successful. Keep reading to find out what they are and how you can avoid them.
What Is Content Marketing?
Before we dive into which mistakes to avoid, it’s important to know what content marketing is and how it can benefit your business. Essentially, content marketing involves creating valuable and relevant marketing content, then sharing it with your audience to attract new customers and retain existing ones. This means that the overall goal of content marketing is to present benefits to customers and convince them to complete an action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a service.
There are several types of content marketing your business can use, including blog posts, e-books, infographics, podcasts, social media posts, videos, whitepapers, and more. These approaches can be significantly beneficial in building customer engagement and conversions while also building their trust in your company as an industry expert.
What Are the Content Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid?
There are a few common marketing mistakes that you could be making without realizing it, and they could be hurting your marketing efforts. Let’s look at the content marketing mistakes you need to avoid.
Starting Without a Clear Plan
As the saying goes, “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail,” and it couldn’t be more true in content marketing. Without a clear, detailed plan and a thoroughly developed strategy, you’re setting yourself up for a significant content marketing mistake. A marketing plan helps you build a framework for the type of deliverables you want to create for your company to sell products, boost services, and increase brand awareness.
Without your marketing plan, you’ll have a hard time creating impactful deliverables that entice your customers to choose your products or services. With a marketing plan, you’ll know what content to create — and when — to have the most impact on your business.
Building Your Strategy Without Using Data
One of the most common marketing mistakes is jumping into a marketing strategy without considering your data. Imagine coming up with an idea just to “see if it works,” only to find out later that, based on your data, it wouldn’t have been successful. Now you’ve wasted resources, effort, and money on marketing that won’t help your business grow.
Instead, you should look to your direct competitors to glean initial marketing data. Begin by checking competitor blogs and website pages to determine which ones are performing well and creating the biggest impact. Consider these factors:
- Content length
- Actionable items
- Current backlinks
- Existing topics
- Underperforming pieces
Failing to Set Goals for Each Content Marketing Topic
Another common marketing mistake is not setting specific goals for every piece of content you and your team produce. If you create a blog and post it without any clear goals, you can’t measure if it was successful or profitable for your company. Instead, if you set a goal of getting 100 leads from the blog or increasing site traffic by 15%, you can track if that actually happens once you’ve published the blog. If it doesn’t, you can use that new information to readjust your approach moving forward.
Not Considering SEO
When you skip out on SEO, you’re losing targeted keywords and content topics that can improve your search visibility and keep you on par with your competitors. Without SEO, your content likely won’t end up on the first page of search results, and other companies may get the business you’re looking for. To avoid SEO content marketing mistakes, keep your copy optimized with the right keywords and maintain an SEO-friendly structure.
Not Defining Your Audience
If you start creating content without a clear audience in mind, you may not be reaching your target demographics or resonating with your current customers, and your efforts could be wasted. To avoid this mistake, take time to define and understand your audience so you know their interests, pain points, and even their buying behaviors. With this information, you can create content specifically tailored to your different customer segments, which can boost engagement and conversions.
Creating Too Little Content Throughout the Sales Funnel
Another marketing mistake that companies run into is putting out pieces with too little content throughout the sales funnel. This means that the copy is likely not attracting, engaging, or nurturing current and prospective customers through the sales process. Avoid this common mistake by developing a sales funnel content strategy and continuing to tweak it as you find what works for your audience.
Lack of Clear Measurements
As previously mentioned, you can’t tell if your content marketing strategies are effective if you don’t have clear goals and metrics in place. You need to be able to tell how well a content piece is performing and whether it’s bringing the engagement you were looking for. So whether you’re looking at website traffic, social media engagement, lead generation, or sales, you need to be able track and analyze these metrics. This information helps you make data-based decisions as you continue to change and build your marketing strategies.
Inconsistent Voice
Have you identified a consistent brand voice yet? This is one of the best ways to build trust and credibility with your customers since they’ll know what to expect from you every time. One of the biggest content marketing mistakes you can make is to skip this crucial step of your business identity. And once you decide on your brand voice, make sure you use it across every piece of content your team produces across all platforms.
Over- or Under-Promoting Content
Part of any marketing strategy is promoting the content you’re creating. However, you need to find the best way to distribute it without over- or under-promoting it to avoid any marketing mistakes. Along with your marketing strategy, create a promotion plan that aligns with your marketing goals and objectives. This helps you distribute high-quality content without being overbearing to your audience.
Need Help With Content Marketing?
Content marketing is an effective tool, and you need a strategic plan to avoid marketing mistakes and be successful. However, it can be difficult to approach this concept and know which mistakes to avoid when you try to tackle it on your own.
At Avalaunch Media, we employ dedicated and experienced content marketing professionals who can help you avoid mistakes every step of the way, from ideation to implementation and everything in between. If you’re looking for an agency to help you bypass content marketing mistakes and get to success faster, contact our team today.