While many marketers think they’re effective at content marketing (42 percent of business-to-business marketers, according to some statistics), many are still making some major mistakes. Unless you have the proper training, expertise, and experience like experts who provide content marketing services, odds are, you’re making some of them too.
No Plan or Strategy
Good content marketing requires two key factors, a great plan and an effective strategy that’s well-executed. It’s important to pay attention to what your target audience wants by reviewing community forums to gain insight and identify how you tailor your content to meet their needs. Then you can set goals to help you achieve your objective. Strategies might include devoting an hour a day to actively participating in Facebook groups focused on your target niche too.
Not Understanding the Target Audience
This brings us to the next point, emphasizing the importance of understanding your audience. Many customers have noted that they don’t feel they’re understood by their favorite brands. There’s a big gap between what customers want and what businesses think their customers want. You might think you know your audience well and are connecting with them, but there’s a good chance you don’t. For example, maybe you want to reach senior-level marketers, but you’re creating how-to guides for entry-level marketers, which is a total waste of time. The focus must be on creating content designed to delve into your target audience’s mind, making it all about them, including what they like and the problems they need to resolve.
You Don’t Have a Peer-Reviewed Approval Process
It’s important that more than one, and ideally several, people review your content before it’s published. Your best bet for ensuring a high-quality piece is to have your teammates and possibly clients review and approve it too. A peer-review process is vital for ensuring that all content maximizes every essential element and is published on time.
Only Creating Blog Posts and Forgetting About Originality
While content may be king, variety trumps that these days. Don’t just create blog posts; your content should encompass various written, image-based, and audio content that can include how-to guides, whitepapers, case studies, social media posts, short-form videos, long-form videos, infographics, podcasts, animations, and even memes.
At the same time, never forget that all content must be original. Copying others will result in your site getting punished by Google and other search engines, which will crush its ranking and your bottom line. Remember when ezine articles dominated the top rankings? Those are gone now after getting hit by a Google algorithm update that aimed to prevent bad content from ranking high. Being original means originality, so don’t rehash the same concepts that countless other posts have either. Many make the mistake of thinking they need to create a ton of content as cheaply and easily as possible, so they scrape it and recombine it into their own content, thinking it will help their ranking only to find it has the opposite effect.
