Content marketing is one of the best ways to build brand awareness, educate customers, create trust, and generate leads. To make the most of your efforts, avoid these five common mistakes:
- Failing to have a strategy. Because so much of life is spent on social media these days, many business owners mistakenly believe that they can simply transfer their personal social media behavior to their business social media accounts. However, posting whatever you feel like posting whenever you feel like posting it on business accounts generally leads to wasted resources, missed opportunities, and inconsistent messaging. You need a comprehensive strategy. Define your audience, goals, key messages, content types, and distribution channels. Every piece of content should serve a purpose that aligns with your overall marketing goals and overall business strategy. Include a schedule so that your posts are consistent and likely to be seen by your target audience. Establish brand guidelines so your content is immediately recognizable.
- Failing to meet audience needs and consider user experience. Sometimes we are so concerned with getting our message out there, or even with producing content in general, that we stop thinking about what our audience needs. The most important thing you can do with content is make it actually useful to your audience. At every step, you should be considering your audience’s interests and pain points. Additionally, make sure you’re considering their experience. While it’s not possible to control UX on social media, on your own site, make sure you’re using simple, mobile-friendly design and limiting pop-ups and other distractions.
- Failing to engage. It’s easy to think of content marketing as a one way street, but you will get better results if you use it as a chance to build community. While you want to put out content that establishes you as an authority, it’s also useful to take feedback, answer questions, and find ways to build engagement, like asking questions of your own or taking polls. Show interest in and appreciation of your audience. In return, your audience will feel a genuine connection and be much more loyal to your business.
- Failing to consider SEO. You can produce the greatest content in the world and it won’t matter if no one sees it. Especially on your own website, optimizing for search should be a top priority. At the very least, make sure you’re using the keywords you’re trying to rank for, optimizing your tags, and structuring your content in a way that’s easily interpreted by Google and other search engines.
- Failing to analyze and adapt. It’s important that you pay attention to how your content is performing and that you know what does well and why. Track the metrics that matter most for your business (views, time on page, conversion rates, shares, comments, etc.) and learn from them. Notice what kind of content your audience prefers (blog posts, videos, polls, etc.) and what topics resonate with them the most. For example, if you make one how-to video a month and it gets twenty times the reactions as your daily inspirational quotes, that tells you that your audience is either hungry for more tutorials or prefers video content. As you learn your audiences preferences, adapt to them. While you want a clear strategy, you want to be flexible enough to change that strategy or create a whole new one when you find something that gets better results.
Substance and Style 