Content marketing is a useful marketing tool for virtually every organization out there. This tool can help keep customers up to date on your company and industry and can produce noticeable increases website traffic.
So much content is being constantly created in today’s world that it could be easy for your content to get lost on the web. With that being said, you should ensure that you are aware of these eight common content marketing mistakes:
1. Not using multiple forms of content: just creating blog posts with the same format again and again is a mistake to avoid. By adding pictures, infographics, and especially videos is what is going to help your content stand out from the rest. People love watching videos and looking at infographics to obtain their information over just reading plain text. You can often re-use or re-purpose content into infographics and/or videos. It will keep your audience more engaged and more likely to remember the information you gave them, and they could come back if they are looking for more information in your industry.
2. Not defining your target audience: not knowing what your target audience is interest in prior to creating content is a big mistake. By knowing who you want to target before you create the content, you are able to tailor the content towards this audience and gain more attention with them. Not only do you want to tailor your content towards a specific audience, but you need to know how to reach them as well. If your audience is most likely to use Facebook to get their information, then that is the platform to reach them. You also want to make sure this information is going to be valuable to this audience so they will keep coming back to your content to get information.
3. Not using SEO: by paying attention to the SEO for your content, you are more likely to get this content to a specific audience. This visibility will spread more awareness of your brand and help to reach your goals. We previously wrote this article “8 tips to optimize your blog posts for SEO” that can help you learn more about SEO for your content.
4. Not using link building in content marketing: link building is a great way to improve your search engine results and helps with your content's SEO. What we mean here is getting other websites to link to your content. Consider asking other popular websites in your industry or similar industries to link to your content. There are lots of different types of websites which might be interested in linking to your content (both inside and outside your industry). Once they link to your content on their website, you got yourself a back link. If you need some ideas to gain more backlinks, we wrote this article “the top nine ways to create more backlinks”.
5. Not including a Call to Action (CTA): a call to action is what will get your visitor to proceed to the next step that you want them to take. You can include more than one call to action as well, but don’t go overboard and lose focus on the actual content itself. There are numerous potential calls to action that will help you in your marketing/sales process, including: links to relevant downloadable content, a contact button for readers to get more information, a request for demo/consultation/review/proposal, adding a subscribe button for your email list or linking to other relevant content.
6. Not looking at reader analytics: one way to figuring out what type of content performs the best and what content to focus less on is to look at the content’s visitor analytics (typically Google Analytics). If a piece of content is performing well, you should create more similar content and consider different ways to expand, reuse and repurpose this content.
7. Not promoting content: once your content is published, don’t stop there. Focus the same (or more) time and energy promoting the content as you did creating it. There are many ways to drive traffic and visibility to content by posting in social media, emailing it, creating videos and more. Consider spending about a month of total promotion time on each piece of content, depending on its value, depth, complexity and other factors. This should be a good rule of thumb.
8. Not being patient: don’t expect to see a gain in traffic overnight once you start creating content. This growth in readers takes time. Creating a constant flow of content and promoting it will help to gain traffic. This infographic created by HubSpot shows you how traffic might increase once a company starts consistently publishing high quality blog content.
Content marketing helps bring new people to your website and learn about your company, but the market is crowded, and it can be easy to get lost. By avoiding these common eight mistakes, your content should be seen by the right audience so they will remember your company.
We are here to help. If you have questions about content marketing or would like some help, please contact us or book a meeting online.
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