Content marketing is a massive part of marketing in general and drives more than 90% of the online entrepreneurship projects. It’s one of the most successful ways to boost your traffic and push a product, service, or a business in general, up and increase the selling of course. Content marketing is the king when it comes to online services, and it’s one of the main reasons a business succeeds. But with the heavy crown come a lot of troubles that people often mistake and don’t take care of.
What are the most common mistakes marketers make? Here is what to avoid.
1. Acting with No Plan
The first thing you should know about content marketing, especially online, is that you need to have a vision, a plan, and a final goal. Lack of any of them and you will be far from success. Creating content for advertising, for a blog, or other, is or at least should be combined with a particular purpose. You can just create content because it needs to be created. Marketing doesn’t work this way.
When you are finally up to the point where you realize you need this kind of marketing for your business, put in the effort and think about what your plan is. Ask yourself why you want to create content, how can it be useful for your users, what can you achieve with it, and what you want to achieve. Then create a plan and follow it.
Often, it’s seen that people write articles and expect business growth when their posts don’t actually have any value. They neglect to have a strategy as the main driving power behind their results. There are 250 million pieces created every single minute. You won’t be able to compete if you don’t put a strategy in it, agreed?
2. Content = Blog Post
Another often mistake when it comes to content marketing is that content necessarily means blogging. As much as having a blog is a must (and by “a must” I mean if you don’t have one – get WordPress hosting and start it right now), there are other ways to express yourself with words and help your business. You can write a post each day for your website, but it still won’t be enough because it is not what content marketing represents.
An idea for what more you can create, think about different guides, tutorials, webinars, social media posts, images with captions, infographics, why not also memes.
Whatever you think of for your content strategy, don’t forget the right content marketing also means storytelling with your words. Writing for volume – wrong, writing only for ranking – wrong, writing without sending a message – useless.
3. Not Analyzing Customer Insights
Customer insights can give mandatory guidelines to what you should do and what you are already doing, but wrong. Before we talk more about analyzing, make sure you know the basics of your buyer personas and audience segmentation. Creating the right content and messages depends on how well you know who you are sending them to.
Even more, when you actually pay attention to the outcomes, you can understand if whatever you are trying to do is working.
A common mistake people make is disregarding what the customers can give to a business. A presenter would be nothing without his or her audience. It’s the same with it comes to online communication. Writing any type of content is, after all for the readers first. Then the value is unquestionable.
4. Focusing Only on SEO
In the last few years, the topic of SEO has become so viral that it has changed the focus of quality. It is known that search engine optimization is crucial to any online business performing, and it can increase incomings tremendously. However, SEO cannot be done right if its focus is only on creating content without thinking about its value.
For example, publishing on a regular basis would not affect your ranking. What matters for search engines is not the quantity but the quality. Marketers create content every day and expect their websites to rank, but that’s not what happens. Why? Because their content is not exceptional, does not bring anything useful to its users, and has no actual worth.
5. Complicated or Not Good Content
Another common mistake among content writers is the content itself. To be honest, we see all kinds of articles online every day, but how much do we actually stop and read? The same goes for ads – we see numberless advertising posts every day, how many do we pay attention to? We all know it’s not a lot. And the reason for that is the content itself.
Could be that we are not the right target audience, or something else, but mostly it is because we don’t find interesting whatever was given to us as such. If you want to advertise your content, think about one good post and promote it instead of creating ten posts and promoting them when they are simply not as good.
Here is How to Improve Writing Skills!
6. Expecting Instant Results
I will finish with one common mistake not only for content marketers but for anyone really. People often forget that things in this area don’t happen in a second. They take time; Google takes time, and audiences take time. And you should take your time too. Rushing into what is trendy now will not give you the results you want. Maybe for a week or so – yes, but not in the long term.
When we are talking about creating valuable content that is worthy to users, then we need to know that it won’t happen in a day. Yes, some genius slogans conquer the world and become great examples of the advertising niche, and yet, others take time to establish as good enough. Be patient, and you will actually create something that is worth it.