Content marketing can achieve dramatic results – but there are a number of common content marketing mistakes a lot of businesses fall foul of.
The argument for content marketing is a strong one: a quick Google search will yield countless stats that prove how powerful it is.
Here’s a little taste:
- Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing but generates three times as many leads
- 82% of marketers who blog see positive ROI from their inbound marketing
- 70% of people would rather learn about a company through articles than adverts
You get the idea. Content marketing works – but only if you do it right.
If your attempts at content marketing haven’t been getting the results you want, maybe your tactics could do with a tweak.
Here are five common content marketing mistakes you might be making…
1. You don’t have a strategy
Content marketing’s easy, right? You just produce content and publish it, right?
No. No, no, no, no, no.
No.
Like many things in life, content marketing works much better if you have a plan. A 2014 study by the Content Marketing Institute showed that 66% of the most successful marketers had a documented content marketing strategy, compared to just 11% of the least successful marketers.
You need to know what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it, when you’re going to do it, and, perhaps most importantly, why you’re going to do it.
Before you begin any content marketing campaign, produce a strategy that sets out your goals, how you’re going to achieve them, and how you’ll measure your success.
Keep monitoring these metrics over the duration of your campaign, and adjust your strategy accordingly.
2. You don’t know who you’re talking to
How do you expect people to listen to you if you don’t even know who you’re talking to?
One of the most common content marketing mistakes we see is businesses not bothering to research their audiences.
Who are your products or services aimed at? How do those people communicate? What sort of questions are they asking, and how can you answer them?
You need to know all of these things before you can create targeted content that will engage the people it’s aimed at.
3. You aren’t promoting your content
‘Fly free, blog post. I release you. Do your work.’
Those are the words of an amateur content marketer, blithely releasing a blog post into the internet wilderness, never to be seen again.
You can’t just publish content and expect it to succeed all by itself. You have to promote it, and keep on promoting it, for as long as you want it to get noticed.
A business that publishes a small amount of content but does a lot of promotion will probably get better results than a business that publishes a lot of content but does no promotion at all.
So how do you promote your content? Luckily, there are a number of different ways:
- Share it on social media – multiple times and regularly
- Link to it in an email newsletter
- Contact any sources you’ve mentioned and ask them to share it
- Pitch influencers and bloggers in your industry asking them to share it
- Add social media buttons to make it easily shareable
- Pitch content to other sites as a guest post
4. You haven’t optimised your content for search engines
This is a big one. We would say that as it’s one of our specialist subjects – but it is.
Content marketing and SEO are a match made in heaven. Content that is optimised for search engines will have a much, much better chance of being found.
Know what keywords you want your content to rank for, and use them consistently throughout – this includes in title tags and paragraph headings.
If you need more details on how to optimise your content, give us a call.
5. You’re just writing blog posts
This is another one of the content marketing mistakes we see most often.
Don’t get us wrong – blogging is great, and you should definitely do it. But there are plenty of other types of content, and you should take advantage of them too.
Infographics, videos and interactive content like quizzes are all great ways to engage your audience.
Here are some statistics that show how effective visual content marketing can be. And is it any surprise? When done well, visual content is attractive, fun and easily digestible.
So give the people what they want and mix things up a bit.
Avoid these content marketing mistakes…
…and you may well see an improvement in your content marketing results.
Effective content marketing is a continual process of taking risks and finding out what works best for you – but it helps to have a bit of a steer sometimes, too.
So strategise, research, promote, optimise and diversify your way to content marketing success.
At UWP, we’re experts at creating bespoke content that gets results. Get in touch to find out how we can help you.