Are You Making These 5 Content Marketing Mistakes?

If you’re making these common content marketing mistakes, Scale has tips to get you on a track to success.

There is a certain art to content marketing in today’s business environment. If you are making easy-to-avoid mistakes, or avoiding creating a content marketing strategy completely, you are ignoring how it may negatively be affecting your brand and company success. Ask yourself if you’re making these five content marketing mistakes and learn how to fix your strategy before it’s too late.

1. Your Content Has No Focus

Are you purposefully designing each piece of your content to address your target audience at every stage of the buying process? Or are you just writing what you think people might read, or worse, just delivering constant sales pitches? Make sure that your marketing and sales teams communicate effectively and align their goals so that conversations had with potential clients in the sales process can inspire your marketers to write complementary content. Remember the importance of identifying your buyer personas, so that your content is focused on informing their research, addressing their concerns, and providing valuable solutions.

2. You’re Not Adding Value

To build authority and maintain customer loyalty, your content should always be adding value to your audience. If you’re addressing current industry practices or stating your opinion on a hot topic, provide meaningful advice and additional resources in the form of content pieces like case studies, informational downloads, videos, webinars, white papers, etc. This gives potential customers something to take with them along the buying process, both in terms of new knowledge and brand awareness whether or not they choose to do business with you right now. If your budget supports it, consider throwing in special offers to ease customer concerns or promote your services.

3. You’re Not Promoting Your Content

Your content marketing strategy should include means for cross-promoting your content through your advertising, e-mail, and social media campaigns. If your content is providing value, that value should be shared across any medium where your customers may find it. Here’s a tip: After writing a piece of content that addresses questions asked by prospective clients in the sales process, share it with your sales staff so they can share with current and potential customers to answer their lingering questions! Then, post the piece to social media and send it to your contacts via e-mail.

4. You’re Using SEO Incorrectly

Optimizing your content around appropriate keywords is absolutely essential, but if you’re overdoing it, your organic ranking with search engines will suffer. Google’s new Hummingbird algorithm doesn’t simply reward keyword-laden websites with links and clicks anymore. Now, Google is looking for quality content that best matches users’ search terms. This means you can no longer buy hundreds of backlinks and stuff keywords onto your website to get better results. Avoid initiating SEO snafus, and learn from these basic SEO tips to get started:

1. Make sure your website pages are optimized around your key services, including keywords in your page titles and service descriptions
2. Create content pieces driven by conversational, “long-tail” keywords. What questions are your customers always asking? Do you have the answers?
3. Place your keywords in meta tags, alt tags, and title tags, as these are all indexed by search engines

5. You Don’t Stick to a Plan

If you start out your content marketing strategy with a great plan for how it’s going to be executed and don’t execute that plan, then you aren’t doing your company any favors. Your brand is dependent on perception, so each piece of your marketing matrix should work together to maintain your authority. For example, if you are over or under posting, delivering inconsistent e-mail campaigns, or failing to follow-up with leads, your whole strategy will suffer. To get started, draft a plan, stick to it, measure its results, and adjust your plan accordingly.

With content marketing growing in importance by the minute in the business world, you cannot afford to make common mistakes and ignore it any longer. Contact Scale to learn how to create a stellar content marketing strategy for your business and measure its results to benefit your brand and industry authority.