Substance and Style

Content Marketing is here to stay for a lot of reasons: it builds brand loyalty, increases brand awareness, educates and entertains your audience, boosts your organic search, and costs less than most other kinds of marketing. We talk a lot here about how to maximize those benefits, but today we’re talking about what not to do. Here are seven mistakes to avoid:

1. Not having an overall strategy. Like any marketing endeavors, it’s important to have a well thought out plan for how the activities are going to affect your business and bottom line. You should establish overall marketing goals and plan how your content will support them. Know your audience and where they are on the buyer’s journey. Create a schedule of what you’ll publish and when and where you’ll publish it.
   
2. Trying to appeal to everyone. It may seem counterintuitive to a small business trying to reach the most possible customers, but Pat Flynn was right when he said the riches are in the niches. It is much better to have an audience of 1,000 where 50 will become customers than an audience of 100,000 where 5 will be come customers. The more specifically you are able to target your audience, the more engaged and loyal they will be. You can take advantage of that engagement by listening to their feedback and creating content that is even more useful for them.
   
3. Not having a goal for each piece of content. Just as you should know your overall marketing and content goals, you should know the goal for each piece of content, even if it’s something fairly general (“entertain my customers”). Ideally at least a third of your content will have a very specific call to action (“download this guide,” “sign up for our newsletter”) and most of the rest should at least suggest a next step (“visit our site for more information”). You should know what you want the audience to do next, and they should be able to easily figure it out as well.
   
4. Not checking out the competition. Content is an easy way to be completely original and set yourself apart from the competition, but it’s a mistake not to read the competition’s content. Their highest and lowest performing pieces will tell you what kind of things your audience wants. You may spot obvious gaps in the content that’s out there and then fill them.
   
5. Doing anything spammy. Posting clickbait or flooding your readers with low quality content will hurt you in search, in credibility, and in customer loyalty. Just think about how you feel about the spam you see every day. Odds are, it’s never made you like a company more or buy something you didn’t already want to buy.
   
6. Being totally off-brand. People are confused and put off by inconsistencies in voice. It’s true that at some point you will probably hire someone to produce content or delegate it to someone else on your team, but you need to make sure that person understands the tone they need to strike. You want your content to be about making an authentic connection. You can’t do that if the content doesn’t reflect the mission, vision, and values of your company. Again, think about your audience and what they need and expect.
   
7. Not reusing/repurposing content. If you’re using multiple platforms often, you will find yourself needing to reuse some of your content or you will burn out quickly. It’s ok to do this, but people don’t want to see the same thing everywhere all the time. Adapt some of your content for a different platform and the different audience you have there. It’s not ok to post the exact same thing on every platform (unless it’s something generic and rare, like “Happy First Day of Summer!”) But it is ok to take a blog post and turn it into an infographic for Instagram or make an explainer video about it.