Most consumers want to have access to content about their favorite brands. According to a report by Meaningful Brands in 2019, 9 out of 10 consumers constantly want content from the brands they appreciate. Thus, we realize how vital this segment is for each brand. Although it seems easy to create such a plan, there are many mistakes that you should avoid in creating your content marketing strategy in order to achieve your marketing goals. Here are 5 common mistakes in content marketing that you should avoid as much as possible:
You don’t spend enough time getting to know your audience
When you write an article or make any other form of content, you should always have two questions in mind:
Is my content relevant to my audience?
Does it satisfy a real need of my clients?
One of the most common traps in digital marketing is that we create content from our perspective, not taking into account what our audience wants. This is backed up by Neil Patel one of the most well-known people in digital marketing.
Before deciding which topic you want to approach, you must be 100% sure that it will be helpful for those who follow you.
In marketing, you need to keep in mind that automation is a “booming” process. It’s not enough to have the talent to write or make a video. For the most part, marketing means data that you can only get by knowing how to use the most used research tools.
Tools to avoid common mistakes in content marketing
According to the Digital Marketing Institute, one of the best tools to collect relevant data about your consumers is Google Analytics. This software will allow you to see which pages of your site have the highest performance and those that are not profitable. Based on this data, you will be able to build a solid content marketing strategy step by step. Remember: the interests of your audience will always be more important than yours.
If you have a website and want to attract relevant traffic, a marketing tool that can help you is Ahrefs Keywords Explorer. This is one of the best tools that can help you position your site in the top organic search results (SERP). It will help you get to know your audience and it will show you the most searched words on search engines. More than that, it will show you how much competition there is for the keywords you want to include on the site. Once you know all this information, you can start working on developing your marketing strategy.
One last marketing tool we recommend is Google Trends. If you are part of a start-up company, you probably can’t afford to invest many resources in marketing tools. However, Google Trends is a free tool that can give you several valuable insights. By accessing it, you will be able to see which were the words most used by people in a period. Also, you can compare the terms with each other and thus see which are the most searched.
You don’t differentiate between performance indicators and regular ones
According to HubSpot, it is wrong and inaccurate to consider the number of blog readers as an indicator that can say about our business that it is evolving in a good direction. If you have an online store, an indicator that you should refer to is the number of conversions.
After all, the goal of any business will be to make sales, to generate profit, and the conversion rate is the best indicator that tells you that you are in the right direction or not. Most consumers want to have access to content about their favorite brands and if your goal will be to engage, an excellent indicator is the number of comments.
If your article generates comments, it means that users are interacting with your content. Whether there are positive or negative comments, you can get a series of insights that will help you streamline your work in the future so that your blog has even more visibility for your target audience.
Plan-related mistakes in content marketing
Our organization played an important role in one of our IT leader’s projects. F5 Podcast is a podcast owned by Bittnet Training that we fully implement: from concept – strategy – guest research and content creation.
The primary purpose of this podcast is to serve as a source of inspiration and information for IT leaders. We started from the premise that soft skills are less considered in the IT field, and we set out to talk to those who aspire to become leaders in this field about the challenges they may face and how important it is to have the skills to help them overcome all obstacles.
With this well-defined goal in mind we had as guests a series of IT specialists who showed us that problems and conflicts cannot be avoided, even in IT. We have divided our goal into several verticals that an IT leader can go through over time: communication, decision making, conflict management, etc. and we created topics that highlight all the facets of each vertical.
With all this information, our goal will be to reach a mass education of people who are either leaders in IT or want to have this status in the future. So, as you can see, you need a plan to suceed. There are two mistakes in content marketing regarding planning.
You think you don`t need a plan
Do you want to generate sales 10% more than last year? Very good! Do you want to increase your engagement by 10% compared to the previous month? Very good here too! But before elaborating the strategy, you have to ask yourself this question: What do I aim for with that strategy?
Marketing is a field in which the principle of cause and effect is very well applied. If you have a well-established goal, you will be able to develop strategies to help you grow your business. If you do not have a well-established goal, the effect will be that you will lose a lot of time and money.
You do not respect the plan you set out to do
There will always be new tasks that will jeopardize compliance with the original plan. What can you do about it? How can you make sure that the initial plan will be followed? By organizing your tasks, you will always make sure that you complete them all. Two handy time management tools that we warmly recommend are Trello and ClickUp. For us, ClickUp works very well.
Did you know that several studies have shown that organized teams are more likely to succeed? Until recently, we knew that the organization is one of the most essential “silver bullets” in our marketing strategy, but now we have the proof. According to CoSchedule, the teams that are organized and fold on a particular work plan have 397% more chances of success in accomplishing the tasks. This means that they are 4x more likely to succeed than a unorganized company. This is a huge improvement.
You have reached the peak, and you can no longer assert yourself
Another thing that very well characterizes the activity of a marketing man is the change. For example, we thought people will get bored to interact with a screen. This was the traditional content and we thought it may not be relevant anymore. Thus, we thought of a new idea, that of creating a podcast of the agency. The project has grown organically in a year and has fully demonstrated its qualities of brand awareness, engagement and lead generation.
Starting from the real need of our customers to be in contact with other marketers who are going through the same difficult period, we created an audio magazine to address this need. Most consumers want to have access to content about their favorite brands. So, the most significant benefit of the project is that this content can be consumed even when you can’t look or you don’t want to look at a screen, but you can listen.
As a small bonus to what we told you, we also offer you a relevant statistic about the evolution of marketing trends. According to Denmand Gen Report, more than half of marketers (53%) say that webinars are the top funnel format that generates potential customers of the highest quality.
Conclusion
At the end of the article, there are two essential things you need to stick with. These things will help you avoid mistakes in content marketing and will help you achieve any business goal you set for yourself:
- Content Marketing can generate concrete and long-lasting results;
- The condition is to not to get in the way of the mistakes above.
If you need more help to grow your brand, here are 3 great tips to improve your content marketing strategy.