Content Marketing : 4 Common Mistakes to Avoid

Content marketing is a key element of a good marketing strategy. Content is especially effective for long-term usage and influences every other online strategy. It attracts new traffic to your site, builds your brand reputation, and influences conversions. Marketers that craft compelling content experience 7.8x more site traffic. By avoiding a few common content mistakes, you can create effective content that will positively impact your brand’s image.

1. Not Knowing Your Audience

Before crafting your content strategy, it is important to know your audience. Don’t base your content on a guess — find out what topics are of interest to your target demographic. Focusing your content on your audience will improve engagement and increase returns. Do your research about your audience — who are they, where are they, what is important to them? Once you know who you’re talking to, what they need, and what they want to know, you can see where your interests intersect and speak to that connection.

The shorts and swimwear retailer, Chubbies, targets their content to a specific kind of customer and uses that persona — the cheeky frat-boy — to inform their online content. Their content is educational and useful in addition to being highly shareable. A well-crafted content strategy can help your brand build a loyal following and generate leads. Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing, but it generates 3x as many leads.

2. Ignoring Quality of Content

Putting together a few words and posting them on your site is not the best way to use content. You should pick a clear topic that will both interest and inform your target audience. Think about the customer and not yourself. You can demonstrate your brand’s personality and showcase products while still speaking to the consumer. Successful content marketing provides information and communicates with the reader.

Your online content should also look and feel professional, clean, and creative. Online content works best when it is broken up into smaller chunks of text. Consider the fact that many of your readers will view your content on a mobile device and structure your posts accordingly.

Don’t neglect grammar and spelling. Proofread and revise your post until it is perfect. If a piece of content is riddled with misspellings and incorrect grammar, it will damage your brand’s credibility and negatively affect your reader’s opinion.

3. Posting Inconsistently is Bad Content Marketing

Content marketing is like other forms of online marketing — consistency in sharing is key. Posting too often will overwhelm your readers and make individual pieces less impactful. However, sharing sporadically and unpredictably will confuse your audience. 91% of successful business bloggers publish weekly, if not more often. Developing a posting schedule along with your content strategy is an excellent way to ensure that you are sharing content regularly without flooding your audience with information.
Fresh content ensures that search engines recognize your site is live and leads to more frequent search engine indexing. This will bring your site better search rankings and increase site traffic. The more content you post, the more opportunity you have to use keywords that will boost your SEO. Creating new content also helps build your brand authority and provides social proof for your company.

4. Recycling Too Much Old Content

High quality, well-written content takes time to create, and it can be re-use old content. Sharing content you’ve already posted is okay — as long as you don’t do it too often. Your audience won’t see every post; so re-sharing previous content can help engagement. However, it’s important to share supplemental content that is new to avoid spamming your followers. Interacting with your followers and sharing articles are good ways to create more online content without having to write an entirely new post.

While a big part of content marketing is the written word, don’t be afraid to include photos and videos. Articles that have an image once every 75-100 words received twice as many social shares than articles with fewer images. If visual content is already a big part of your online marketing strategy, consider merging it with your written content for greater success.

Creating compelling, effective online content is a challenge for many marketers. However, the returns from sharing well-written posts on a regular basis include increased site traffic, brand authenticity, and customer engagement. Before diving into creating online content, build a content strategy that reflects your brand’s personality and values. Focus on the reader rather than trying to make a sale, and make sure that your content is appropriate and interesting to your audience. By avoiding these common caveats customers will be able to organically interact with your brand and bring you unprecedented content marketing success!

What are some other content marketing faux pas you’d hate to see your fellow marketers commit? Share your knowledge in the comment section below!