The rise of social media and internet marketing has proven him right. No business can afford to miss out on making content marketing a part of their marketing strategy. It is the primary method for brand awareness and increasing profits. Content marketers want their content strategies to do more than simply drive engagements and establish industry expertise. After all the time spent on research, strategy, engagement, development, and distribution, your content marketing strategy should drive revenue as well.
As powerful as content marketing is, though, a content marketing agency might still struggle with generating results from their efforts, with only 42% of B2B marketers reporting their content marketing to be effective.
source: businessesgrow
This isn't because content marketing doesn't work. Rather, it's due to some common content marketing mistakes that cost businesses thousands of dollars per year, and in turn, negatively affects their brand awareness campaigns.
What 'more' we need to do to scale up our content marketing strategies that would attract a potential customer?
Do what you are exactly doing, but the key is in working smart and hard. In this blog post, we're going to show you 5 most common digital content marketing mistakes and some sure tips to avoid them in the form of idea content marketing examples. Let's have a look at:
1. Lack of Appropriate Plan / Technique
Always remember, your job is to create a meaningful content asset, which is way ahead of traditional marketing tactics and fits your buyer persona perfectly. This can be in the form of a blog post, visual content, search engine ads, and more content type that suits your business requirements.
For successful content marketing, you need to have a brand awareness plan, to create a documented content marketing strategy that aligns with your organizational goals. This can make the difference between succeeding or failing at delivering quality content. It is always important to make sense of what, how, why, when, and where while you are conducting a content audit. Without answering these questions, your content marketing plan will be unfocused and, therefore, ineffective.
Tips: A well-planned strategy includes making sense of who to target, what type of content marketing effort will be appreciated by your target audience, and what is your team capable of delivering to them and how you can use this further down the sales funnel? Don't simply make content like an attempt to close the deal instead, but come up with content ideas to recognize your audience's queries and requirements. Use good content as a device to associate with your audience rather than selling them your products or services.
There are a number of tools you can use to scale up your content marketing strategy making it even more efficient. A tool like DrumUp, helps you share great content with your Facebook, Twitter, and other social media accounts as well as other valuable content through native advertising in the form of blog content and videos you can start meaningful conversations with your followers.
You can also use the skyscraper technique of identifying gaps in existing content to create better content based on thought leadership concepts that you follow.
2. Not Maintaining the Consistency
Content is nothing without consistency. If you're not consistent, you're not taking advantage of all the opportunities you have to connect with your audience. Lack of inconsistency of content quality, quantity and schedule can confuse your customers. If you rarely update your business social media profiles, your followers will likely lose interest or even may forget about your pages, and when you post again, it will be seen by a smaller audience. You perhaps don't want this to happen!
Tips: Regular content creation is indispensable for brands to succeed in the media-centric world. From social media and blogging to responding to customer reviews and replying to emails, your content needs to maintain a consistent voice, tone, and style. Having all of this and more will only make your content strategy wholesome.
Think of it this way: Picture your favorite dish. This dish is probably in one of your favorite restaurants, consistently delivering amazing taste, and you might find yourself interested in trying other delicacies from the same place, simply because you know and love its previous foods. That's powerful.
Similarly, with consistent, engaging content, you can hit touch points on your audience's online journey, build strong connections with them, and position your brand on top of their minds. - HubSpot.
How do we get found in search engines? How do we get people to talk about us on social? We better be interesting and helpful, and we better do that on a consistent basis.
Joe Pulizzi, Founder - Content Marketing Institute
Other than consistency, it's always important to SHARE, SHARE, and SHARE your content. Sharing your content on the right platform and at the right time can help you connect with your target audience and improve your rankings. By doing both, you can provide better helpful and personalized information in a relatable way, which will get them talking about you, and thus you can make them a part of your marketing funnel.
3. Missing Out on Accounting SEO
SEO and content marketing go hand in hand in the era of digital marketing. You can ask your audience who use both together. It's a deadly combination to smack down your competitors if done right. The biggest issue with most of the businessmen is about perceiving both to be completely separate and individual aspects of digital marketing, but that isn't the case. While creating content just for SEO purposes is a mistake but marketers should also refrain from missing or ignoring SEO completely.
Tips: Even if you've written the most exquisite piece of content, what's the point if there is no one to read and share it further. This is where search engine optimization comes into the picture. SEO enhances your content marketing strategy by making your content more discoverable. SEO helps you draw users to your site while content marketing keeps them there and helps convert them. SEO states what the requirements are for content. Content marketing meets the requirements. Content that is SEO optimized is easily found by Google and other search engines. So, the best idea to ensure the success of your inbound marketing strategy is to tightly couple your SEO and content strategy together.
4. Not Measuring Content Marketing Performance
One of the biggest content marketing mistakes we see in businesses is failing to review their content marketing efforts and failing to measure the ROI of their content marketing efforts.
Tips: It's very important to take out a day in three months to track your content marketing metrics that prove that your efforts are working. Measuring the performance of content helps maximize sales leads, conversions, and return on investment. You can implement measurement techniques to identify what's working, discover areas where improvements can be made, and concentrate on more impactful efforts. According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, among the most successful content marketers, however, 72% report their organization measures content marketing ROI.
source: contentmarketinginstitute
To start, first decide on which content marketing metrics are most important to you; is it sales, website traffic, exposure and reach, or leads? Then, tie your results to these metrics and the amount you spent creating content that generated either a positive or negative uplift. According to SEMRush, there are 10 metrics to measure:
- Traffic
- Social shares
- Backlinks
- Click-through rate
- Email opt-in rates
- Engagement
- Leads generated
- Sales generated
- Conversion rate
- Lead close rate
So, start tracking.
5. Missing on the Right Practice of Content Distribution
You cannot justify your efforts in writing the most exquisite piece of content if you are not proactive with your content distribution. And this is the stage where most companies fail while scaling up their content marketing programs. If you fail to promote your content even on the most popular social sites like Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis, your audience is bound to get lost.
Tips: The digital landscape is getting popular and competitive day by day, this being the case, if you miss distributing your content, your target audience will never find it. The right practice for content distribution begins by being active in three areas: search engine optimization, social media marketing (Facebook and Instagram being the top social platforms, as of now), and email marketing.
In order to maximize your content reach, you must start promoting your content on multiple social media channels. Look for communities and social media sites where you can share your content. The first step to creating a content marketing distribution strategy is understanding the goal of your content marketing campaign. You also need to have an insight into your target audience's behavior. You need to know which content distribution channel they prefer and what type of content they are looking for and at what time. You should also consider using email outreach to share your content, along with even paid ads.
source: mailmunch
According to a Mailmunch survey, the top five content distribution strategies are:
- Influencer marketing
- Email marketing
- Organic social media distribution
- Guest blogging
- Paid distribution
By far, the best content distribution for 2020 is to build relationships with influencers. We have other tips to rely on to scale up your content marketing program for 2020. Contact us today!