Writing a blog is easy. You sit down at your computer, fuelled by a spark of passion and creativity, and begin to write. Then you cast your eyes back over your wordy masterpiece, hit publish and sit back waiting for the views to come rolling in.
But wait.
Writing content isn’t always that easy.
In order to create content that consistently produces results for your business, you need a solid content marketing strategy.
Creating blog posts and social media content on a whim can be great when you’re just getting started. But this type of content planning will only get you so far.
To help you start creating content that serves your audience and your business, let’s begin by looking at the content marketing mistakes your business is making right now, or that you want to avoid making in the future.
Before we dive into the content marketing mistakes to avoid, we first want to hold our hands up and say that we’re also guilty of making these mistakes from time to time. Nobody is perfect. We all make mistakes.
But the trick is to be aware of the mistakes you are making so that you can recognise them, rectify them and stop them from being made again in the future.
Writing for the sake of writing
The number one mistake that we see small businesses making when it comes to content marketing is this: writing for the sake of writing.
You know you need to write content for your business. But you don’t know the reason why you need content or which content it is you need. In turn, you will just create content for the sake of it.
The result? You will end up with a blog, social media channel, newsletter or podcast that is filled with high-quantity and low-quality content.
Churning out content can sometimes be counterproductive for your business. Especially if you are churning content out without a strategic plan to inform your content creation.
Content strategy is the backbone of content marketing. You need to understand the ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘who’ behind your content before you start writing. By doing this, you can make sure that you are creating purposeful content that people want to read.
More importantly, you can create content that inspires your audience to take action.
Thinking content marketing means just writing blog posts
Did you know that your content marketing strategy is about more than just writing blog posts?
By now you’re probably all too familiar with the phrase ‘content is King’. However, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking content is King = blog posts are King. This isn’t true at all.
The real secret is knowing that content variety is King. If you are guilty of having a one-track mind when it comes to creating content for your brand, it’s time to get off the single content marketing treadmill and onto the content marketing field.
Content marketing can include:
- Blog posts
- Whitepapers
- eBooks
- Webinars
- How-to guides
- Checklists and listicles
- Podcasts
- Short-form videos
- Long-form videos
- Memes (yes, really!)
- Social media posts
- GIFs
- Infographics
- Case studies
- Animations
- Live videos
It’s time to move beyond the blog post and start thinking about what other types of content would appeal to your target audience. From here, you want to make sure your content marketing strategy incorporates each of these content types.
Remember, you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel every time you create new content. You could write a long-form blog for your website and then think about the ways you can repurpose this written content to create organic social media posts, short-form videos and other types of content for your brand.
Focusing on sales
As a business owner, sales are your number one priority. Without sales, you won’t have a business. But that doesn’t mean that everything you do has to be done with the sole objective of directly increasing sales.
It is important to remember that not everybody you speak to is ready to purchase. Think about how it makes you feel when someone approaches you in the street and instantly starts trying to sell something to you. Chances are you find it insincere or annoying and you might be quick to escape them.
Now, think about how you feel when someone approaches you in the street to offer you a free product. We’re going to guess that you walk away with a smile on your face and a free treat in your hand. This is because they have offered you something of value for free. You will then be more likely to think of this person/brand when you are ready to buy this type of product in the future.
It’s all about playing the long game.
You need to create content that meets your audience at every stage of the customer funnel. This means that it is important to produce content that offers value for your audience without expecting them to take a sales-based action in return.
Recent research shows that only 66% of content marketing strategies prioritise the informational needs of their audience over the organisation’s sales message. Yet, 88% of the top content marketing performers do put audience needs above their sales message.
Instead of focusing on sales (bottom of funnel content), make sure you are focusing on creating content that serves customers at all stages of the customer journey. This includes creating informational and educational content for customers in the top and middle funnel stages of their customer journey.
Not having a dedicated person for content marketing
Being a business owner often means wearing multiple hats at once. One of the hats you may find yourself wearing is the hat of a marketing professional or content writer.
Writing content is a specialised skill set that requires the writer to reshape technical information into something that appeals to the targeted audience.
A strong content writer will be able to produce data-informed content that is relevant, meaningful and beneficial to their audience. They will also understand what keywords to use, how best to present the information, and what the desired goal of each piece of content will be.
Can you effectively write purposeful and results-focused content for your business if your focus is split across several key areas of your business? The sad truth is, probably not.
Please know that I am saying this from a place of experience (as the owner of an agency) and a place of kindness (as a fellow business owner). In the early days of business ownership, you will need to juggle various responsibilities and tasks to help get your business off the ground.
However, this presents another challenge for your business. Being stretched thin across multiple disciplines within your business can make it harder for you to generate powerful results from each of those individual disciplines.
This is where the power of outsourcing comes into play. Building a team of specialists where each member of your team has a specific focal area will help you harness greater results for your business. Whether you choose to hire internally, work with a partner agency or outsource work to a freelancer is entirely your choice.
Almost one-third of companies (32%) lack a full-time person dedicated to content marketing, while this number drops to 13% when looking only at the top content marketing performers – according to research by Content Marketing Institute.
Further findings showed that 50% of all respondents outsource at least some of their content marketing. Content creation topped the list of outsourced content marketing activities for all respondents (84%). This shows that many businesses recognise the value in outsourcing their content to a specialised team.
Only using owned media
The easiest way to create content as a business owner is to publish that content on the channels you already own. Most business owners or internal marketing teams will produce content for their email newsletter, their website and their brand social media channels.
Content produced for these types of platforms is known as ‘owned media’. Owned media refers to using channels that you have control over. These channels make it easy for you to get your content out into the world for your audience to see.
However, only using owned media is one content marketing mistake that can limit your reach.
Making use of earned media channels can be a powerful way to extend your reach and get even more eyes on your business than ever before. As such, it is important that your content marketing strategy looks beyond owned media. You should also make plans to include earned media channels such as guest posting for other publications, speaking at events or on podcasts, and engaging influencers or media publications in marketing campaigns.
Research showed that the top performers in content marketing are more likely to amplify their content using earned media channels including:
- Media/influencer relations (46% of top performers vs. 34% of all)
- Guest posts/articles in third-party publications (63% vs. 48%)
- Speaking/events (70% vs. 63%)
Along with owned and earned media, it can also be worthwhile considering how paid media can form part of your content marketing strategy. Paid media refers to advertising channels including Google Ads and paid social media.
Findings from the above-mentioned research also revealed that 84% of respondents had used paid media channels in the last 12 months. Among those who use paid methods, 72% said they used paid social as part of their content marketing strategy.
So, if you are guilty of only distributing content through owned media, take this as your signal to start exploring the world of earned and paid media.
Expecting instant results
Content marketing is a business investment, not a get-rich-quick scheme. Unless you already have a large audience, content marketing won’t produce immediate results for your business.
Content marketing requires effort and investment. It can take months before you start to see the results from the content you have produced. The more time and effort you invest in content marketing, the more your traffic, revenue and customer loyalty will grow. However, this growth won’t happen instantaneously.
Research by Hubspot found that companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month get 4.5x more leads than those that only publish 0-4 articles per month. However, it is key to remember that content marketing is about more than content quantity.
The quality of your content will also influence how it performs. You need to develop a dedicated content marketing strategy that is focused on reducing guesswork and increasing performance. Having a content marketing strategy that is focused on both SEO and your audience will enable you to create content that produces consistent, long-term results for your business.
Not measuring performance
If you write blog posts, publish social media posts or send emails and never look at them again, you could be missing out on some valuable insights.
Measuring the performance of your content marketing activity is the best way to understand what is and isn’t working for your audience. With these insights, you can learn what you need to do more of in order to succeed, along with knowing what content tactics need finetuning.
If you aren’t measuring the performance of your content, then you’re not alone. It seems there are a few business marketers out there who are missing out on the powers of performance analysis. In fact, only 43% of B2B marketers say they measure ROI and 65% have established key performance indicators (KPIs). Meanwhile, 67% of the top performers evaluate ROI and 83% monitor KPIs.
So, if you want to be a top performer when it comes to content marketing, it’s time to start measuring performance.
In order to measure performance, you first need to make sure you have content marketing goals in place.
Don’t have any content marketing goals? Then let’s just say that’s another bonus mistake you just might be making. Go back to mistake #1 “Writing for the sake of writing” and think about your why.
Why are you creating content? What do you want that content to achieve? Your answer to why should, in part, inform you of your content marketing goals.
Once you have your goals in place, develop the key metrics that you need to analyse in order to determine performance. You can then measure the performance of your content marketing activity against your content marketing goals AND your wider business goals.
By doing this, you will be able to demonstrate the ROI of your content marketing activity and you will also be able to figure out what changes to make going forward to ensure improved performance in the long run.
Content Marketing Mistakes: You’re not alone
How many of the content marketing mistake boxes did you tick? Zero, one,… all seven?
Don’t worry! If you have been making any of the above content marketing mistakes, the good news is that there’s still time to rectify things. Take your learnings from this article and get to work improving your future content marketing activity.
We all make mistakes. The important thing is to make sure we are learning from our mistakes.
If you’ve read this article and realise you could benefit from having a content marketing specialist to help you review your activity and advise on how to create content that shines online, we are here to help.
Contact us to find out about our content marketing training opportunities or to enquire about handing your content marketing activity over to our specialist and dedicated team.
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