If your website hasn’t sold a common pin, go back to your drawing board and look for mistakes in your content marketing strategy.
But in case you never know how to do this or what content marketing mistakes to look for, I have done the looking for you.
Reading this post will show you what are the deadly content marketing mistakes to avoid, why content marketing fails, how can the mistakes cost your efforts and what can you do instead to make your content marketing strategy work?
Content marketing is a strategic approach to sales conversion.
You can use a blog, social media post, or newsletter to do content marketing.
And you also have the choice of combining all forms of content marketing and doubling up your conversion rate.
Content marketing, however, is to make people be aware of your business, consider your brand and buy from you through your posts.
If something goes wrong with your content, no matter how great your website is, believe me, no sales can come out of it.
There are some big content marketing mistakes you need to know so you can avoid them while toeing this career path.
Many people wanted to do content marketing with the hope of making money, but they’re always disappointed because of their several mistakes.
There are several ways to make money online legitimately.
If you choose to start blogging, affiliate marketing, dropshipping or reselling, you need great content.
Name any online business of your choice, your success depends on your content.
If your content doesn’t resonate with your audience, you have a long way to go.
But the good news is you are one step close to your destination with this post.
Content Marketing Mistakes To Avoid
If you can identify the following deadly content marketing mistakes and do away with them, you’ll definitely become a successful content marketer.
And these are:
#1. Creating poor content
Do you know that your content defines your website?
So, creating poor content will disappoint your target audience and make them feel you’re not competent to address them.
What I mean by poor content may be one or more of the following:
- Short content (less than 600 words).
- Content that doesn’t solve the reader’s problem or search intent but rather plays around it.
- Content that doesn’t have visual items such as images, videos or infographics, etc.
- Content full of grammatical errors and blunders.
- Content that contains outdated and inaccurate information.
- Content copied from another source.
To be frank with you, it’s better not to publish anything than to lose the conversion potential of your audience.
One of the deadly content marketing mistakes to avoid is publishing content on your site without taking your time to conduct an in-depth research on the subject and writing grammatically error-free content.
This mistake can make the audience don’t want to visit your site again.
Based on survey findings, 50% of those who get content directly from brands said what they get is usually not relevant to them.
This implies that any content that fails to meet the needs of the audience is absolutely useless and can’t be used for marketing.
So, it will be sad if someone discovers your content and what he finds thereof is jargon.
What to do instead?
To create content that will make the audiences want to engage with you or consider buying from you, you have to know the kind of content that they want to read.
This may be too difficult for you to do manually.
So, I’ll advise you to use a tool such as Facebook audience insights.
Here is a detailed guide on how to use Facebook audience insights, in case you’re not familiar with the platform.
Using this tool will give you insights into your audiences and their activities on Facebook.
With the data, you’ll discover the kind of content that will attract the audience.
As a content marketer, it’s important to know what your audience wants to read so you can engage them properly.
Consequently, your leads will increase and most of your audiences will become your patrons.
#2. Not leveraging social media
It’s a very big mistake to create content for your website and wait for search engines to decide your fate.
Optimizing your content for SEO can truly boost your organic traffic, but not enough, most especially when social media can complement your SEO effort.
If someone searches Google, for instance, and Google fetches your content for him, the benefit doesn’t end there.
If the content is interesting, the audience will use the social sharing buttons on it to share the content.
And the more this happens, the more traffic, leads, and conversions you get.
Meanwhile, most prestigious and outstanding content marketers can’t even emphasize more than they do the benefits of social media in their content marketing strategy.
After creating your content, it’s a good practice to promote it on social media platforms.
You can also promote other people’s content on your social media platforms so they can do the same for you and lead their audiences to your website.
#3. Not using analytics tools
Analytics tools are software applications that you can use to get insights into how your content performs.
Examples are Facebook audience insights and Google analytics.
With these tools, you will know which of your content generates more audience and which generates below the average so you can optimize.
When you use an analytics tool in content marketing, you’ll always get firsthand information about your audiences – their demographics, how they engage with your content, the kind of device they use, and from which country they access your content over a period of time.
Because this information can help you get the most out of your content, not using the tool is a big content marketing mistake you should avoid.
#4. Making everyone your target audience
Making everyone your target audience is another deadly content marketing mistake most beginners make.
The thought of many people is that when you target all and sundry, your customers will dramatically increase.
That’s not and will never be true.
I don’t mean you should target a few people, either.
What is meant by audience targeting is focusing your attention on a particular group of audiences and ensuring your content is relevant to them.
This doesn’t mean that the particular group of audiences you are targeting should be low or scanty.
What you shouldn’t do is target different categories of people, all at once with the same content.
This is a very common mistake in content marketing as most beginners don’t have a clear strategy.
Everybody just wants to reach all audience niches, which isn’t practicable.
That is to say, if your content marketing strategy targets everyone, then it targets no one.
Let’s say you’re into female clothing, then your audiences must be either female children, young ladies, or old women.
You can’t say because you’re into clothing and start targeting both female and male audiences.
The result of your content marketing will be poor if you don’t have a clear group of audience you target with your content.
To avoid this content marketing mistake, you should know your niche and make sure you target just only those who will benefit from it.
Your audience can be targeted based on their shared interest.
So, the reason why you can’t target both male and female audiences that need a cloth at a time is that both share two different interests.
The female audiences need skirts and blouses, while the others need shirts and trousers.
As you’re into female clothing, then your must target the female group and let go of the male group.
Targeting the wrong people will render your content marketing ineffective.
Imagine how big would the Onitsha market be.
If you’re trying to sell all the commodities being sold at the entire Onitsha market in a single store, you’ll end up making poor sales as your approach may confuse the customers.
While the smart ones among the customers would prefer to go to a well organized store with a more specific niche, you will struggle to get a loyal customers.
That is how it looks when you are trying to target everyone, with no specific target audience in particular.
The audience has a different range of desires, intents, and preferences, all of which you can’t meet if you are targeting everyone at a time.
Even if you tend to meet the expectations of all groups of audiences, you’ll be exhausted and yet your output won’t blend well with everyone.
#5. Have no clear idea or strategy
The last but not the least content marketing mistake to avoid is having no clear content marketing plan or strategy.
For me, I can say this is the most common content marketing mistake of all, especially when Neil Patel of all people admitted to making the same mistake.
Embarrassingly enough, this is one of the first mistakes that I made when I got into content marketing. Neil Patel
So, you can barely see a successful content marketer who didn’t make this mistake.
I know what it is like to have no working strategy to generate leads and conversions on your website.
When I started content marketing, I would publish short blog posts and see no organic traffic.
As a result of this, I put my blood, sweat, and tears into the job and upgraded to a long-form of blog post.
But yet I still couldn’t sell anything with the traffic when it came.
That was how I realized that it takes another strategy to generate leads from your traffic.
I found out that I wasn’t even offering any service not to even talk of generating leads and conversions to the business.
Since I wasn’t offering a service or product on my site, it didn’t occur to me initially to encourage the audience to buy from me.
For that reason, the audience only visited my site to read quality posts and bounced out when they were done.
That was counterproductive, and I couldn’t blame them.
The major lesson from this sad story is that when you have no goal, you can’t have a strategy.
Since this is your turn, what can you do to avoid this annoying mistake that I made?
Ask yourself the following questions:
- What business do you do that your audience can patronize?
- What do you want the audience to do after reading your post – do you want them to leave or stay and place an order?
If your content marketing goal is to generate leads for a business, then the smartest option to take is to make your audience place an order after reading your post.
But how can you ask your audience to buy a product or service after reading your content marketing piece without being overly promotional?
That calls for the need to use Call To Actions (CTAs) across all your content.
Your CTA will tell the audience that you can help them further by highlighting the exact solution you offer and asking them to opt-in.
Meanwhile, you can use CTAs to collect tons of leads with your content marketing strategy.
For more information on this, read how to set and optimize CTAs on your site.
By doing so, the audience won’t have a choice but to follow the CTA as it suggests except he isn’t the right audience.
Conclusion on Content Marketing Mistakes
If you want to be a successful content marketer, content, they say, is king.
At all costs, you must avoid all the common content marketing mistakes I discussed in this guide. Doing that won’t only make you top your close competitors, but also boost your sales conversion.
Internet users discover almost 100% of the products or services they buy while surfing the web.
So, if you have a website and want to grow your business, or work for other brands, then you must know how to make your content marketing strategy works.
You must do all you can to make sure your plan or goal is clear and create sufficient quality content to attract potential customers.
If the people consuming your content don’t have a clue of what your business is all about, becoming your customers won’t be possible.
And if that isn’t happening, your sales can never improve.
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