The amount of data we produce each day is truly mind-blowing. It’s hard to stand out with your content when there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day. Creating top quality content is an integral part of achieving success with content marketing. After all, if what you’re creating doesn’t add any value to the reader, it’s hard to expect your content will increase your business. With this article, we want to help you to learn more about what mistakes should be avoided in order to become a content marketing pro. Let's dig into the most common 5 mistakes that content marketers do.
Mistake 1 : There is no content marketing strategy
Why does content marketing strategy matter? Imagine yourself driving a car without any particular destination in mind. How long will you go until you run out of gas? How soon will you get bored and lose motivation to go any further? The same is with the content marketing strategy. When there is no clear vision of what your content should look like and what results it should provide, it‘s naive to expect that your invested money and time will provide desirable outcomes. Specified time-frames will give you a better understanding of how long it will take to reach beneficial results.
Knowing the importance of marketing strategy is only the first step. The second one is creating a strategy that brings desirable results. What do you need to know before writing a successful plan?
- Specified goals. As we mentioned above, understand why are you creating this content marketing strategy in the first place? What are the specific results you would like to achieve? Your goals could differ from creating brand awareness to deliver more traffic to your site which turns to buyers. If you make a long-term strategy, divide your strategy into shorter periods of time. It will be more beneficial to write more detailed and less vague goals. It’s good to use the SMART goals technique which helps to write precise and measurable goals in a specific timeline.
- Defined audience. What is the geographic location of your audience? What types of problems do they encounter? These and similar questions will help you to clarify your buyer's persona and provide better content.
- Content. Content is a magical word that describes a process of brainstorming, creating and publishing relevant information to your customer. It takes a lot of time, effort and creativity. Setting clear goals and understanding the most common issues of your business niche, will save you an enormous amount of time thinking about what could be interesting for your customer.
- Budget. Having a defined budget will give a better view of what type of advertising tools you could use. How much are you willing to invest in marketing? Do your goals correlate with your budget? What will be the CPA (cost per action) of your product or service?
- Marketing. Without the right marketing tools as well as specified advertising channels, your amazing content will be only seen and liked by your best friends. That’s a sad truth. Defining your audience and choosing the right platform to advertise it increases the chances to get more engagement from your customers. Also, having your business online shouldn’t close traditional marketing doors. For example, even if you are selling coffee beans on the internet, invest more time in participating in coffee events where your target audience can actually try coffee instead of trying promoting its taste on Instagram.
Having a clear and well-defined strategy is one of the main elements of successful content marketing that will not only give more focused marketing goals but also helps measure campaign results and achieve better results.
Mistake 2 : Your targeted audience is too broad
As we mentioned above it’s hard to write relevant and worth-reading content without keeping in mind the target audience and their interests. There is a tendency to create content that goes opposite to what business’ target audience might be interested in. Why is it important to target a specific audience? Unless you have a frequently-used product or service, your audience will be very specific, other times - very broad. In order to create more targeted and customer - orientated content, you need to know what information should be included in your content. By targeting a specific group of customers it is easier to understand what type of needs they have. If you sell cosmetic products to youth under twenty, you probably won't write an article about anti-aging products. Creating content for targeted-audience will help you to attract people who are willing to buy your products or services and save some money on marketing.
As your business has more than one type of buyer’s persona, your content strategy can have more than one type of reader or viewer. Few content marketing agencies have created great tools to describe a buyer’s persona. An ideal customer could be defined as a hypothetical person who is interested in your product or business based on your market research. Buyer’s persona provides a better insight into what type of content you should create. In other words, a buyer’s persona is very similar to the target audience just way more defined. Questions which might help you to define your target audience:
- What does your ideal customer look like?
- What kind of topics will be the most interesting and useful for your customers?
- What kind of problems do your customers experience?
Mistake 3 : Quantity over quality
Many content marketers focus more on the number of articles they produce rather than the quality. We are living in an age when everyone creates and publishes content daily. Customers are over-flowed with information and as we live in a fast-working society, people got very picky and tend to carefully choose what to read or follow online. Below we share some tips on what defines good content which is worth sharing:
- Before starting to deep-dive into content marketing ocean, focus on the type of content which is getting the biggest engagement rates in your market. Engagement rates could be defined as shares, likes, and comments on social media. Check out the influencers and competitors in your field, what type of content they produce?
- If the majority of your content consists of visual material, you might want to consider investing in a good camera or software that will be used into processing visual materials. Invest money wisely and the returns will be doubled. After all, low-quality images in your online store will give a feeling that the product might be not that good.
- Google loves long content. The latest research about current search engine algorithm changes shows that if the content is longer than 2.000 words with relative external links it is more likely to get in the Top ranks. So take your time and write an informative and research-based article.
Through producing content which is more informative, in-depth, engaging and longer, you can attract readers from your competitors and start establishing yourself as a thought leader. By the end of the day, your marketing goal is to sell the products or services and not to publish the content just for the sake of it.
Mistake 4 : Focusing too much on SEO
Although SEO is still playing an important role in page rankings, it shouldn’t be the greatest focus when creating content. Speaking about too much SEO means that you are using too many keywords and because of that the readability of the article is low. AI of search engines is quickly improving and there is no need to use a lot of keywords as it understands the connection between keywords and its synonyms. Always remember that the reader of your article is a human being and that is why you should concentrate on creating interesting and compelling content.
The same goes for the eCommerce site it is best to use only a moderate amount of SEO keywords on your pages. So if you want to achieve good results with SEO, you’ll need to put in the extra effort into creating content that is relevant to both your readers and the search engines.
Mistake 5 : Concentrating on only one format
Creativity is one of the main ingredients of top quality content. Content has a lot of different formats: infographics, white papers, visuals, videos, and others - you name it. Because there are so many options, sometimes you might feel overwhelmed with information. Save yourself some time and follow well-known brands that work with creative content such as Shutterstock, Canva, etc. These companies share great insights on qualitative content as well as content trends.
Mood boards are one of the best ways to not only get inspired but also to gather different types of content in the same place. A mood board can be described as a set of different images to better visualize a specific idea and in this case - content. For example, Pinterest is a great tool for creating mood boards as well as gathering ideas in one place from your competitors.
Generally speaking, social media can be used to do research on what type of content your opponents share. Take a look at what your competitors are doing and see if their content could be somehow improved. As Pablo Picasso once said good artists copy, great artists steal. Experiment with different content formats to see which works the best to attract your target audience.
Learn from your mistakes and improve your content marketing every day
To conclude, creating successful content marketing requires not only different sets of skills but also continuous improvement and thirst to learn. Write a well-planned strategy with a target audience in mind, get inspired and create content which is qualitative and engaging. You might not become a content guru after reading our article, but at least you will have a clue about what common mistakes could be avoided when preparing great content.
