There are a bunch of content marketing mistakes that I consistently see companies making that are worth pointing out. If you can manage to avoid the pitfalls below, I guarantee that your content marketing efforts will be more successful, helping you to reach your goals.
So, without any further delay, here are the 10 content marketing mistakes you can’t afford to make this year along with some tips on how to avoid them:
Content Marketing Mistake
1. Not knowing your audience, considering the biggest content marketing mistake. The secret to creating great content is knowing your target audience. For B2B content marketers, that audience typically consists of the buyers & users of your company’s products & services. Your number one priority as a content marketer is to understand who those buyers & users are. What do they care about? What challenges do they face? What factors motivate them to make decisions? There is a bunch of demographic & behavioral information that you need to gather so that you can create personas for your target audience. Doing so will allow you to create truly targeted content that will be much more likely to resonate with your audience & help move them down the path to purchase.
2) Next Content marketing mistake is, Not creating enough content. It’s really hard to reap the benefits of content marketing if you’re not producing a lot of content. If you’re only creating one piece of content a week, or worse, just one piece a month, you need to pick up the pace. Take the time to build a content factory so that you’ve got the people, processes, & tools in place that you’ll need to publish a new piece of content every day. Doing so will help ensure that you drive more people to your site by not only helping to increase search engine traffic, but also by making your site a destination where people can come for valuable information.
3) Making it hard for people to find your content. Spend all of the time in the world making great content, but if no one can find it, you’re wasting your time. That’s why it’s so important that you carefully construct your website so that visitors can quickly access relevant content from your home page. Not only that, you absolutely must be optimizing all of your content with the right keywords so that people are likely to find it — & your website — when searching online.
4) Failing to listen. Great B2B content is never created in a vacuum. After all, for your content to be great, it’s got to be what your audience wants. That means taking the time to listen to your customers, paying attention to what people are talking about in your industry, & following what your competitors & industry influencers are doing. Content creation starts with listening. It’s the only way to be sure that what you’re creating is timely & relevant.
5) Not leveraging others. Content marketing may be the responsibility of the marketing team, but it’s definitely a task that requires the participation of many. To be successful, you have to tap into your co-workers & industry influencers for their subject matter expertise as well as their networks to help ensure that your content is getting shared with all of the right people.
6) Not making your content engaging. We live in a world where people have very short attention spans. As a result, you’ve got to make sure that your content is engaging in order for people to notice it. That means making your content visual, asking open-ended questions to promote comments, & giving people ways to interact with your content.
7) Missing opportunities to distribute & promote your content effectively. Just because a piece of content is ready to publish, don’t make the mistake of thinking that your work is done. You’ve got to figure out the right way to get that content to the people who it is intended for. That doesn’t just mean posting it to your website or sending out an e-mail. You also need to ensure your content is on the right content-sharing sites & being promoted through the appropriate outbound communication channels for your specific audience. Whenever possible, you also want to give your audience the ability to subscribe to your content.
8) Always reinventing the wheel. Don’t make this classic content marketing mistake by making things harder than they need to be. Instead, look at your content needs holistically & figure out how you can reuse the content you’ve already created to help meet them. For example, consider turning a series of blog posts into a white paper or eBook, or leveraging your latest podcast or video to create an article or infographic.
9) Passing up opportunities to answer people’s questions. If a customer or prospect has ever asked you a question, that question had better be the inspiration for at least one of your pieces of content. Anything that your target audience wants to know they should be able to learn through some piece of content that you’ve created. Fail to do that & you’re passing up a huge opportunity.
10. Making it all about you. Remember, content marketing isn’t about touting why you’re so great at every turn. People want answers to their questions & solutions to their problems, not just details about your new product or testimonials about why it’s fantastic. Why there’s certainly a place for this stuff, make sure that you are also creating content that speaks to broader issues, trends, & questions being raised in your industry. Offering a little bit of thought leadership will go a long way toward helping to build your brand.
