Content marketing is an extremely effective way to attract and retain customers by consistently creating valuable, relevant, and compelling content. However, with so many moving parts, it can be easy to make missteps.
10 Common Content Marketing Mistakes
Mistake #1: Not Having a Strategy
Perhaps the biggest mistake you can make with content marketing is not going into it with a solid strategy. Without properly defining your goals, target audience, topics, distribution channels, and methods for tracking success, your content marketing efforts are bound to fail.
To avoid this mistake:
- Clearly identify your target audience and buyer personas
- Research what topics your audience cares about and build content around those
- Map out a content calendar to plan what you’ll create and when
- Determine where and how often you will distribute content
- Set specific goals and KPIs to track like website traffic, leads generated, and sales
Having a documented content strategy will give your efforts more focus and make it much easier to tell what’s working.
Mistake #2: Inconsistent Posting
Building a loyal audience requires consistently publishing content on a regular schedule. Sporadic posting makes it hard for people to know when to expect your content and risks them losing interest.
To prevent inconsistent posting:
- Figure out the optimal posting frequency for your resources
- Build content further in advance so you have a backlog to pull from if needed
- Use social media scheduling tools to plan an entire month or more at a time
- Set reminders to keep you on track with your content calendar
By sticking to a regular content output schedule, your audience growth and engagement rates will improve over time.
Mistake #3: Putting Content Behind Paywalls
While it’s understandable to want readers to pay for your best content, putting everything behind paywalls limits your ability to attract new readers. Having at least some content freely available serves an important purpose.
To use paywalls effectively:
- Only put your very best, most valuable content behind paywalls
- Ensure you have a robust free content library to attract new visitors
- Promote select gated content to tease the value while still having accessible posts
With the right balance of free and paid content, you can grab attention and provide ongoing value.
Mistake #4: Ignoring Promotion and Distribution
You can create the best content in the world, but if your audience doesn’t see it, it won’t have an impact. Promoting your content across social media, email lists, marketing channels and more is required.
To distribute content further:
- Research relevant online communities and groups to share content
- Use email marketing to update subscribers on new posts
- Promote blog posts on social media via organic and paid methods
- Guest post on industry websites to expand your author reach
- Syndicate posts on third-party publishing platforms
There are endless opportunities to get content out there—you just have to take advantage of them.
Mistake #5: Not Optimizing for SEO
Most content marketing strategies rely heavily on search engine optimization (SEO) to drive organic traffic from Google and other search engines. Ignoring important SEO elements causes you to miss out on huge potential traffic sources.
To optimize content for better SEO:
- Research relevant keyword phrases with good search volume and competition
- Incorporate selected keywords naturally throughout content
- Include meta descriptions, titles, headings and image alt text with keywords
- Optimize blog post length, internal linking structure, and page load speed
- Build quality backlinks from external websites
By keeping SEO principles in mind while creating content, you will notice your organic rankings and site traffic steadily improving.
Mistake #6: Focusing Too Narrowly
While specializing in a niche area makes sense for some businesses, others benefit more from creating a wide variety of content on many topics. Only blogging about new products, company updates or similar overly narrow subjects limits who will engage.
To expand your content breadth:
- Identify secondary sub-topics and angles related to your industry
- Cover industry news, trends, guides, expert interviews and thought leadership
- Link to relevant evergreen content within new posts when possible
- Test content on new subjects and see which resonate best with your audience
Widening your content scope provides more value for readers and more opportunities to generate post ideas.
Mistake #7: Forgetting About Content Repurposing
Coming up with 100% new content every single time requires immense effort. Savvy content marketers reuse and repurpose existing content to make their lives easier. Repackaging assets in new formats allows you to quickly create additional posts.
Content repurposing best practices:
- Turn old blog posts into visual infographics or videos
- Compile categories of posts into comprehensive guides
- Record webinars based around your popular blog content
- Break long posts up into multiple shorter posts for serialization
- Create new guest articles for industry websites using parts of old ones
Having an arsenal of repurposed content will make posting more manageable.
Mistake #8: Neglecting Content Updating and Maintenance
Over time, webpages can break, links can stop working properly and content can become outdated. Ignoring necessary updates and maintenance causes technical issues that provide a poor user experience.
Here’s how to better maintain content:
- Set calendar reminders to revisit old posts for needed refreshes
- Check back on linked out resources to confirm they are still accurate/relevant
- Update any changed processes, facts, statistics or information
- Modify content layout, contact info or visuals as needed
- Delete or refresh old content that ranks poorly or no longer fits
While not the most exciting work, content maintenance is critical for providing readers with accurate information.
Mistake #9: Lacking Clear Calls-To-Action
Every piece of content you create should advance site visitors further down the sales funnel ultimately towards a conversion. Without clear calls-to-action telling readers what to do next, you will have a hard time generating leads.
To add better CTAs to content:
- Place relevant, appealing CTAs in easy-to-find locations
- Tailor CTAs based on the post topic and target persona
- Drive newsletter sign-ups, content offers, webinar promotions, etc
- Ensure CTAs stand out visually with color contrast, size, placement
- Test CTA language and styles to determine what works
Well-designed CTAs that match the content topic will help convince more readers to take your desired actions.
Mistake #10: Not Analyzing Performance
The only way to know which pieces of content work and which don’t is through in-depth analytics analysis. Looking at website traffic sources, completion rates, social media engagement, links clicked, and more provides data-driven insights to refine your approach.
Tips for better content analysis:
- Compare the performance of blog posts to identify successes and flops
- See which distribution channels drive the most traffic and shares
- Look for content gaps that need to be filled to meet demand
- Check which keyword phrases result in the most search traffic
- Monitor analytics regularly to spot changes and new opportunities
Let hard data guide editing decisions towards creating content that performs better.
Key Takeaways
With content marketing, mistakes and missteps happen but don’t have to halt your progress entirely if addressed properly. Remember these best practices:
- Begin with a documented content strategy
- Post consistently on a regular schedule
- Avoid placing all content behind paywalls
- Promote and distribute content across many channels
- Incorporate SEO principles during content creation
- Produce a wide variety of content on many topics
- Repurpose and repackage old content when possible
- Maintain old content to keep it technically sound and accurate
- Include clear calls-to-action in all posts
- Analyze performance frequently to determine content effectiveness
By learning from these common blunders, you can avoid making them yourself and ensure long-term content marketing success. With a strategic, thoughtful approach you will reap the many benefits quality content provides.
Now get out there and create compelling content! Just steer clear of these all-too-common mistakes and keep the guidance here in mind.
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