Content marketing is one of the best things you can do in this social media age to get more eyes on what you have to offer. People are always looking for something new to read, watch, and share with their friends.
It’s not just about writing up a blog post and sticking it on your website. Certain mistakes will make it harder to reach your goals.
Head them off by learning exactly what they are and how to avoid them.
Take a look at the five most common content marketing mistakes people make. The knowledge will ensure you don’t fall into the same traps when launching your own content.
1. Jumping Straight in Without a Plan
- A content strategy is absolutely crucial to your content marketing.
- Figure out why exactly you’re making this content.
- What goals are you trying to reach? What numbers do you want to see?
- Be as specific as possible.
Measurable goals, or SMART goals, are the aim here. You need to be able to follow how well your content strategy is playing out by how close you are to reaching your goals. If you can’t track them, you have no way of knowing that your content performs the way you want.
Start with the end goal and work backward to create a plan that gets you there.
The SMART criteria are also great for creating KPIs or Key Performance Indicators for your content marketing. These indicators let you know that you’re on the right track to reaching your main objective.
After you have your attainable goals all worked out, you can start putting a plan into action to reach them.
Make sure you come back to the table to reevaluate and update your KPIs as needed. They may require some tweaking to keep them in line with your goals, depending on how your content strategy plays out.
It always pays to stay on top of things.
2. Failing to Do Your Research
Doing proper research into your target audience will let you know what content you should be focusing on.It’s easy to come up with a bunch of blog topics you think will do well and start writing them into existence. That won’t matter if they aren’t relevant to the people you’re trying to reach.
Your target audience isn’t going to read something they have no interest in, even if it’s good content.
Look into the people that you’re trying to reach with your content and tailor it to them. They will be more likely to sign up for your newsletter or click through to your product page if they relate to what you’re putting out there.
Analyze social media and website analytics to build accurate buyer personas.
Take a look at the kind of content your biggest competitors are posting. If they’re a thorn in your side, they’re probably doing something right. You can more than likely learn a thing or two from their content.
Surveys are another great way to get to know your audience better.
When you structure your content around what you know your audience wants to read, you’re much more likely to get the conversion numbers you want to see. It’s a win-win for everyone!
3. Sticking Only to Writing Blog Posts
Humans are easily distracted creatures — especially on the internet.Don’t just write text-heavy articles. It would be best if you had a healthy mix of media to keep your audience entertained.
Images are an excellent place to start. They help you break up walls of text in your blog posts, so people want to keep on scrolling. Your information seems a lot easier to digest thanks to visuals.
Infographics are the natural next step up.
They make the information you’re trying to get across much easier for your audience to digest.
Plenty of studies show the effectiveness of images in articles. It turns out that content containing relevant images get 94% more views than articles that don’t have any visuals.
These aren’t your only options, though!
People love how-to guides and checklists that help them solve their problems.
You can also create videos as a form of content to add to your marketing strategy. They are extremely popular, especially on social media.
Don’t write yourself into a corner by sticking to only one kind of content. If you really want to reach as many people as possible, try to fit as many different types into your content marketing as you possibly can.
4. Not Including Enough Calls to Action
If you want those conversions, you need a clear call to action to go along with your content marketing.Make it very clear what exactly you want your audience to do. Create calls to action that prompt visitors to sign up for your mailing list, download your PDF, go to your product page, etc.
If it’s not clear what you want, you’re probably not going to get it. So throw it in their face at every chance.
Set up different CTAs for different points in your content. Such as signing up for your newsletter when they first come on the page. Or looking at your product if they are engaged enough to reach the midway point of the article.
Make it easy for them!
5. Neglecting to Promote Your Content
Keep in mind that just because you put content out doesn’t mean people are necessarily going to see it.There are millions upon millions of blog posts and articles written every single day.
On top of making sure you stand out to your audience as something they need to read, you need to ensure they can actually find you. Drawing people in is the entire point of creating content, after all.
You need to promote your content marketing.
Spend 20% of your time making your content and 80% of your time pushing it. Promotion is well worth the majority of your time. Without effectively getting your content in front of people, it’s not going to work for you.
You can promote your content marketing in many ways:
Social Media Posts
Emails
Asking Other Influencers to Share
Writing Guest Blogs for Similar Sites
All of this will lead the right people to your site, to your content, and then to the place you want them to go so that you can reach your goals right on schedule.
In Conclusion
Content marketing is fantastic for your brand. People are frequently on their devices searching for answers to their problems or trying to learn new things. Maybe they just want something to read in their downtime.By providing content, you fill a void for someone out there and gain a customer as a result.
Creating content is almost a necessity these days.
Don’t let yourself get caught up in the frenzy of pushing out content as quickly as possible. By doing your due diligence you'll avoid making the same common mistakes as those before you. Now, you can give your audience content they will genuinely enjoy.
[Author bio]
Dominique Daniels is the Business Manager at The Marq. With over five years of property management experience, she begins and ends each day loving what she does. She finds joy in helping current and future residents and makes The Marq a place everyone loves to call home.
