Content marketing is one of the most important yet the trickiest strategies to position your business as it may be difficult to consistently create content that resonates with your target audience. The challenge of balancing SEO with smooth and natural flow is seemingly impossible at times. And with so much content available online, it’s harder than ever to produce pieces of content that stand out from the crowd.
An effective and creative content marketing strategy might help in this situation. A good content marketing strategy could be the difference between successive viral content posts and posts that gain no exposure. Creating a strategy that maximizes the return of your investment (ROI) takes a lot of trial and error and even the most experienced content marketers make mistakes. It appears to be a natural and inevitable part of honing your content marketing strategy.
Thus, it’s important to embrace your content marketing missteps and leverage them to develop a better strategy.
We will explore some of the most common mistakes in content marketing strategy, show how to fix them, and which lessons to learn from them.
Lack Of A Written Strategy
When it comes to content marketing strategy, clear direction is crucial.
It’s hard to achieve results if you’re not entirely sure what you’re trying to achieve in the first place. You might have frequent meetings to discuss your content marketing strategy, but it’s a good idea to have a written document detailing the strategy.
To clarify the direction and objectives of your content marketing strategy, you should create a document and share it with the entire team. This can be a ‘living’ document that evolves with your strategy.
“Revisit the strategy as a team often to identify any areas for improvement and adapt to the interests of your audience. A written and shared document ensures that everyone is on the same page, literally, in terms of content marketing strategy,” explains Michelle King, a content strategist at Revieweal and UKWritings.
When creating your marketing strategy document, here are some essential factors to establish:
- What are your goals?
- Who is your target audience?
- Who are your biggest competitors? What do they do well?
- What keywords are your viewers searching for on search engines?
Ignoring Insights From Data
Data is now one of the world’s most valuable resources for a good reason.
Data offers businesses the opportunity to gain an understanding of their consumers. Despite this, some companies still make the same mistake of determining their content marketing strategy without using data.
Many teams try every possible topic related to their niche and hope that at least a couple of them gain traction. While this is a fun and flexible approach to content creation, it doesn’t exactly produce the best ROI. If you’re lucky, a piece of content might reach your intended reader. However, this approach to content strategy is not helpful for consistently high-performing articles.
Instead of ‘winging it,’ develop a well-informed content marketing strategy based on data. Insights into the patterns and behaviors of your target audience can help you identify topics for blogs and your content in general, with the most promising ROI.
To leverage data in your content marketing strategy, observe the most discussed topics on social platforms pertaining to your niche. Similarly, you could analyze the leading competition and their highest ranking posts on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Focusing Solely On SEO
Yes, SEO is essential to creating content that reaches its intended audience. But to focus only on SEO is a mistake. Writing for search engines might help attract readers to your content, but it’s not likely to engage their attention. The practice of prioritizing keywords over the quality of writing is sure to backfire.
If your content is evidently not written with humans in mind, readers might permanently lose interest in your articles.
As opposed to writing with the intention of ranking high on SERPs, create content that aims to provide value to your readers. Write articles that pique their curiosity, evoke emotional response, and engage thought.
Skipping Keyword Research
Although SEO is not everything when it comes to content marketing, it does matter. One of the best ways to rank high on SERPs is through keyword research. Keywords play a huge role in content optimization. Skipping out on this process is a common, but easily fixable mistake.
Keyword research enables you to optimize your content and give it the best chance of reaching your intended audience. Here are some strategies to try when researching keywords:
- Research keywords that your biggest competitors rank highly for.
- Research keywords based on the most significant and relevant topics to your business.
- Research keywords under related searches.
Absence Of A CTA
You’ve done the work of researching a viable topic, produced content that balances SEO with writing that flows naturally, and you successfully attracted readers. Without a call to action (CTA), you lose out on this perfect opportunity to convert one-time readers into long-term subscribers. With so much focus on creating valuable content, it’s easy to forget to actually market your business within the content itself.
Ensure that each content post includes a clear CTA. Encourage your readers to engage in the comments, and subscribe for more content.
Creating Content For Everyone
It’s easy to lose track of exactly who your content is for.
Producing content intended for everyone and no one in particular is one of the most common content marketing mistakes. When you fail to target a specific reader, your content will have a harder time reaching anyone. It’s challenging to create content that engages readers when you have no idea who the reader is.
“To avoid content that is simultaneously aimed at everyone and no one, identify your ideal reader. Top-performing articles have an intimate understanding of who their reader is. The content performs well because it provides valuable solutions while engaging their readers,” says Barry Oliver, a writer at Elite Assignment Help and Custom Writing.
This wouldn’t be possible without identifying a target audience.
Overlooking Social Listening
When you have extensive experience in content marketing, you understand your target audience intimately. Regardless of how well you know your readers, they could still surprise you.
Overlooking the practice of social listening means potentially missing out on trending topics and important keywords.
Social listening offers the chance to monitor, analyze, and engage in conversations with readers on social media platforms.
This is one of the best ways to gain insight about your readers because it comes directly from the source. To start social listening, follow any relevant hashtags to your brand and your industry.
Neglecting To Review Performance
One of the most costly content marketing strategy mistakes is failing to review how your content is performing. A review allows you to identify the parts of your strategy that are working and those that aren’t.
Reviewing your content marketing performance at least once every quarter is a good idea.
If you want to achieve growth as quickly as possible, consider monthly reviews. Analyzing your content marketing gives you the opportunity to continuously improve your strategy.
Conclusion
If you’ve ever made any of these common content marketing mistakes, the good news is that you’re not alone.
These common errors are easily fixable and offer valuable insights into content marketing. While content marketers should attempt to avoid these mistakes, what matters more is how they use their errors to improve their content marketing strategy.
**********************************
Emily Henry is a content marketing manager and editor of Big Assignments and State Of Writing. She writes articles on content marketing strategy and consumer engagement tips for various websites and publications, like Paper writing websites reviewed.