How many people might possibly be aware that something could go ‘wrong’ with the content that they put out in the digital world, otherwise known as ‘content marketing mistakes’ among marketers?

Content marketing mistakes can be the potholes of an ineffective strategy and clever execution.

“ We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.”

Craig Davis, former Chief Creative Officer at J. Walter Thompson.

You’re barking up the wrong tree if you still think your content strategy is not working. And, it is time to find out where you might be erring. 

Many people who think that content marketing strategy is just blogging are falling into the abyss. But understand now that blog articles are only part of your content strategy many other components are included. Let’s talk about this in detail in the coming sections of this blog.

Making mistakes in content marketing or failing to maintain a lucrative content strategy can be caused by slight negligence. For example, suppose the ad campaign you are running is in bad taste with the audience.

It does not matter how much you work for it, you will still be in a situation where you are climbing a fruitless tree.

Therefore, the purpose of this blog is to remind you of some of the mistakes you often make unknowingly in content marketing. Let’s see what they are:

1. Not Knowing What Your Audience Wants

If the content strategy is heading for a flop, reduce your losses before it is too late! 

Today, in the realm of marketing, no one is willing to do anything to the detriment of User Intent and User Experience.

Imagine that you are looking for customers all over the online world with content that no one wants to see. That’s stupid, isn’t it? 

Inaccurate knowledge of your target audience is one of the common mistakes of many businesses today. Remember, getting a moment’s attention from people can be a daunting task.

Keep in mind that effort alone is not enough, and you will have to compete against countless world-class brands. Irrelevant content will not only distract your audience but will also make your minds hate them and turn their backs on it if they see your ad again and again. 

If you want to produce good content, you need to know about today’s trends. Let me tell you the best way to do this. Nothing else than reading news updates, and it is not that difficult either.

Start exploring HubSpot, SmartBrief, Entrepreneur, Digiday, Adweek, and more to get better ideas to create engaging and attractive content that audiences would like to read.

2. Thinking About Only Blogging 

Do you think in your content strategy, just creating a blog can drive traffic to your website? Many still believe that content marketing is just the epitome of “blogging.”

The marketing of content is much more than blogging and article posting. This is only one of the numerous sorts of effective content marketing strategies in full orbit. They include –

• Images
• Videos
• Infographics
• Guides
• PPT/Slideshare presentations
• eBooks
• Podcasts
• Contests
• Webinars
• Pinboards
• Screencasts
• White papers
• And many more

Indeed for the content marketing strategy, certain businesses should not rely only on blogging.

How can you determine which content marketing approach is best? You need to explore and find out what kind of material connects best with your target audience.

3. Avoiding User-Generated Content

Research conducted by Reevoo states that 70% of individuals get attracted and have more trust in images posted or created by customers, rather than images created by brands. Marketing people that disregard user-generated content lack a huge chance to develop brand loyalty. 

Marketers should learn about what motivates their customers to produce content and engage with your business by using content generated by users.

It’s an amazing approach to run a user-generated content campaign with the usage of social media networks, especially through Facebook and Instagram.

User-generated content is nothing but any unpaid content created by the user. It can contain photos, videos, testimonials, youtube vlogs, comments on social media, reviews, and more.

4. Not Personalizing Content

A buyer’s journey can be portrayed through 3 steps, mainly:

• Awareness
• Consideration 
• Decision

Starting with First Stage Awareness, your audience may have a question or problem where they face a lack of information or solution.

In the Consideration stage, they search for service providers or companies providing solutions to their problems across all online channels.

In the 3rd and final Decision stage, they will confirm a provider to better go with. 

Customers may not always create an incentive choice in the B2B situation to buy their goods or service. Each consumer undergoes a purchasing journey that enables them to decide whether or not to invest in your brand.

Content can assist them to decide that. You must generate content that is appropriate in all stages to influence the buyer’s journey. You can customize your material according to the needs of your buyer.

5. Not Focusing on Target Markets

A distinct digital advertising approach is necessary for each target market. Whatever succeeds with techies will not work with their fathers and grandfathers’ generation.

You may need another theme to create influence within the kids’ category or any other group of enthusiasts. But you don’t necessarily need to create content for each and every interested individual.

Besides, you should Identify and observe the niches in which you may get a lot of chances to play with the content based on the tastes and preferences of the audiences.

This can better help you 2x improve your content strategy and resources and develop a greater brand reputation. Briefly, just focus on specific ages, interests, or places.

6. Thinking that SEO is Dead

Know that SEO cannot ‘die’ anymore. Rather, it evolves always. Focusing on SEO makes your campaign more visible on the search pages of Google. The organic traffic you get can gain only through SEO – only the way you do it changes thanks to Google algorithm changes. 

You can never see your website appearing on Google without the back-support of SEO. Keywords are a good beginning place. Find the keywords that are relevant to the user and make sure that the content you produce can solve the user’s problem.

Including these keywords in your titles and meta descriptions ensures that your page matches these keywords well.

Make sure the content is organized appropriately when creating content pieces. To organize it, use the appropriate titles and subheadings. Use the visuals concerned to maintain your readers involved.

You can employ internal links if you don’t have a link-building plan. Such links will enable you to deliver more content with valuable information to your users and make them view other pages on your website.

Create CTAs or call to action buttons to persuade readers to get connected directly with the company. For instance, you may place a “Contact Us” CTA if you have written a blog about a service you provide. This will enable users to get your contact details immediately with a click.

7. Mobile-Friendly UX is a Must

Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, etc, drive traffic to your website directly from social media without having to search on Google. As per the recent mobile internet statistics, around 4 billion people use internet services via their mobile phones to do more than half of their daily needs.

You may lose a plethora of chances if your material is not mobile-friendly or if you do not have a captivating Mobile UX design. Mobile ease is an essential consideration in the ranking of the search engine.

Google has enabled automatic smartphone indexing on all new sites from 1 July 2019. For ranking and positioning, Google favors the mobile version of the information. Make your photos, websites, and content mobile-friendly to speed up your content strategy in 2021.

8. Not Measuring Your Results

What would the result be when you do not know what happens with your content plan? You’re in a sinking ship!

The first and foremost thing that one should not neglect is the early establishment of measurable targets. Based on your mission and vision of the company and your product or services, objectives can vary.

You might want to make your website more conscious of your brand or attract more quality traffic. If you define objectives, you can measure your findings efficiently. 

Monitoring results can assist you to see the contribution of your content strategy to your business. Evaluating your objectives can assist you to see the benefit to be gained from your content strategy.

You may always enhance your content strategy if you do not see any beneficial effects. Statistics can also provide additional details to know your buyer’s tastes and interests.

9. Not Promoting Content Enough

Following the writing process, content marketing does not stop. Many advertisers mistake concentrating on content creation alone, but marketers must regularly bring the material before their target market to make a significant difference.

Advertisers should then take more time to promote their content than to create them. In addition, spend 20% of the effort developing content while using the remaining 80% to market it through social media, blogging, e-mail, and other social media platforms.

10. Not Creating Reusable Content

It costs time, money, and effort to create content. Content of quality can not be developed every time from scratch. You can make useful and attractive items that can be reused along the way.

Create reusable content. For example, you can repackage the last blog post of a guide in an infographic.

11. Using Same Content Format

Maintaining a consistent approach to content is a good practice. Your audience is however interested in adopting various material types. But it can occasionally get monotonous or boring with the same information format.

In addition, infographics or instructive films can also be created to increase engagement together with regular blogs. Digital resources like White Papers, eBooks, or templates may also be produced as these can better create leads that add value.

Playing with various platforms and types of content will attract your readers and reveal what works best for them.

12. Too Much Focus or Buyer Interests

You have to realize that when you generate content, you’ll be analyzing your target market. To keep the intention of your market in mind, a content strategy must be established.

Find out what kind of subjects your audience wants. Many markets tend to concentrate on search results of search engines when generating content instead of taking into account the interests of their clients. Writing subjects to improve your rank will not succeed in your content marketing plan.

If the content you create doesn’t give value, it won’t create any result. This is why your audience is looking for research subjects. See your customer and figure out what material is relevant to them.

You may always use social media to find out what to convey to your target audience. The main goal of your content strategy should be the creation of useful material that assists your target market.

13. Manual Posts on Social Media

Social media posts can be made more effective than going through manual postings. It can save you a lot of time thereby, money too. You spend a great deal of time publishing on social media platforms manually and personally.

To handle all your social networks under a single umbrella, use programs such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and many more. Use such software to facilitate all postings on one site on your social media. Some of these tools offer adequate capabilities to get you to begin with the basic and free plans.

14. Running a Campaign Without Proper Link Building

Here, content and SEO interact directly. You must connect to popular pages of the website while publishing new and error-free content. This helps the freshly released URL swiftly establish good link equities and pass through the SEO.

Additionally, you need a decent plan when developing fresh content to gain backlinks to that new post from great sites. These strategies boost your content’s SEO power, which improves your marketing strategies. Unfortunately, this isn’t the point of many digital marketers.

15. Not Positioning Content on The Sales Funnel

Your main objective is to sell when you create any content piece. To do this, a careful sales funnel for your product or service is vital.

Now it needs to be placed correctly at the relevant step of the sales funnel when you develop content. It must contribute to a transformation and engagement of the target group from one level to the next.

16. Unattractive Headlines

Titles or headlines play a big role in generating better customer engagements. No one would click on your links on Google and social media if you don’t have eye-catchy headlines. This single error would kill your marketing plan for content.

17. Creating Irrelevant Content

A huge blunder in the marketing of content is writing about subjects out of the range of your market. To do this, your target group must know precisely what that is, what it consumes, and when it is consumed.

There are various tools to assist you to design your articles according to current trends. ‘Google Trends and Answer the Public’ are two known platforms that can help you create content strategies for your customers. Both can help you identify what happens on what audiences see online.

18. Writing Blindfolded

If you develop content without even an appropriate content strategy, you are swimming blindfolded through the waves.

Nowhere will you get success, and you will probably end up with failure if you do so. The best outcomes are hidden within your content marketing strategies.

A major theme and various sub-topics which link with the main page will be the general structure of your website and creating content for them according to the structure is the best part of your content strategy.

You can yield better results in this way. Everything is interconnected, internal traffic is generated and you know how to write organized.

19. Not Managing a Calendar

“What, When & How!” Here, you should always know the “WHEN” better to best handle the “HOW.” Briefly, you should manage a calendar for everything you are going to deliver or publish.

When will you publish next? Which topic will you discuss? What keywords to target? Who is this stuff going to target? With what channel do you produce the content? These are some of the crucial questions you may have to ask yourself.

If you manage a calendar for this, your answers can be found in a comprehensive content calendar.  Sadly, a lot of people don’t take this seriously!

20. Creating Multiple Posts on the Same Subject

Every page of your website may have its own keywords. But if you’ve published content for quite a while, it can be hard to find new themes without overlapping.

Multiple posts covering the same subject are referred to as duplicated contents. This is not going to be a good yield and this may penalize you according to the regulations of Google.

Bottom Line

With the above in mind, when you create your content strategy you can try to avoid these mistakes as much as possible. Because, perhaps, your content strategy does not always give good results. 

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