Content Marketing seems rather simple for people who have never made a serious attempt to implement its principles. People often don’t care about the content marketing mistakes. All you have to do is publish great content, promote it on Social Media, and hope for it to find its way to as many readers as possible. Unfortunately, things are much more difficult in practice.
You can read multiple guides that teach you how to approach the challenge of content marketing, but not all of them tell you which mistakes you should avoid.
List Of Content Marketing Mistakes
If you want to learn the proper ways of promoting products and services through online content, you have to be aware of the mistakes that you need to avoid. Let’s start from there; read the following list of 10 mistakes that all content marketers should stay away from.
1. Avoiding Keyword Research
Are you seriously planning to neglect one of the most important aspects of content marketing? If you don’t infuse the right keywords into your content, it will remain invisible for the search engines, so you’ll fail to reach out to a greater audience. You need search engine optimization in order to enable Internet users to locate your publications through a Google search.
2. Too Much Buzz About Yourself
Do not publish an article or social media update about every single event in your company. No one cares about the new employee or a minor achievement that’s important for the growth of your business. Do not suffocate your follower’s feed with fresh social media posts on every 30 minutes. If you are trying to create too much buzz about yourself, you won’t achieve a good effect.
3. Creating All Content For Yourself
Your readers and followers expect you to educate, challenge, and entertain them. Your content marketing campaign should be all about solving their problems and meeting their needs. Before you can start creating blog posts and articles that promote your business, you have to know your customers. Communicate with them through social media platforms. Find out what they want and make sure to provide it. Ask them what they would like to read about and try to respond to meet their expectations.
4. Doing Everything Alone
If you just started your business, you want to cut down the expenses as much as possible. This policy may lead you to a tricky situation: you won’t be able to achieve everything! Content marketing takes a lot of time and commitment. You have to write great articles and publish them on a schedule. Social media profiles also require diligent maintenance. If you committed yourself to a full-time content marketing campaign, you would be left with no time to handle the business itself. When you recognize the need for help, don’t hesitate to delegate part of the work to professional services that enable you to collaborate with an experienced author from different niche. Australian Writings is such a service – it enables you to get assistance at any stage of the planning, writing, or editing process.
5. Too Much Focus On Social Media Promotion
Let’s clarify this once and for all: social media promotion is really, really important. That’s why you should approach it carefully. Social media profiles are among the main tools you have for promotion. However, you don’t want to bore your followers with unnecessary updates. Do not focus your entire content marketing campaign on this type of promotion. Try blogging, article writing, and other methods that help you attract customers without being too aggressive.
6. Quantity Over Quality
Remember the golden rule that applies to any situation: less is more! This doesn’t mean that you can keep neglecting your schedule and publish one high-quality article every year. Content marketing does require frequent posts, but you should recognize the limit. When you start noticing that your attempts to post frequently are affecting the quality of your content, you should loosen the schedule. Never sacrifice quality for the sake of quantity!
7. Failing To Brand Your Content
When you’re too busy implementing the right keywords in a post you’re about to publish, you might forget about the importance of branding. Your content needs to come with clear authorship; otherwise, Google won’t direct many of its users your way. When you’re listed in Google results with a photo next to your link, your content will seem more professional.
8. Not Targeting Your Audience
Who exactly are you trying to attract through your content marketing campaign? If you don’t identify your target audience, not many of your readers will become actual customers. Do not go too viral; make sure to target a specific audience that can benefit from your products and services.
9. Failure To Encourage The Audience
Do not limit your content to articles, blog posts, and social media updates. Once you identify your target audience, you need to encourage their participation through polls, surveys, and contests. Think of incentives that will make your business attractive to potential customers. Talk to them! When was the last time you asked for feedback from someone who purchased a product or service from you? There is only one way to discover the satisfaction levels of your customers: ask! Encourage them to write reviews and comments, and make sure to answer all questions they have.
10. Lack Of Call To Action
Don’t you want your readers to share and discuss your content? Well, you need to invite them to do that. Ask a tricky question at the end of your article, and encourage them to share an opinion. You can also ask them to fill out a form that enables them to get your updates via email. Finally, you can also provide a link where they can purchase the product/service you offer.
When You Find the Perfect Balance, Your Content Marketing Campaign Will Be a Huge Success!
Business owners who start posting random content online do not benefit from the entire potential of the Internet. Avoid the mistakes of posting irrelevant, too frequent content that does not solve the problems and questions of your audience.
When you stay away from the 10 Content Marketing Mistakes listed above, you’ll be on your way towards effective promotion that will result in great online reputation for your company.
Hi Stephanie
It was a nice read. I like #6 most as most of new bloggers today only focusing on quantity rather than providing quality. Also, I see lot of people giving up as they don’t see quick results.