While everyone knows that content is still king, many fall into common mistakes and miss the goal. Mistakes can ruin a brand’s reputation and lower the bottom line. Here’s a list of 4 common content marketing mistakes to stay clear of.
Pumping Out Content Without a Purpose
To ensure leads, conversions and sales, your content should have a specific purpose. Define your purpose and use it as a map to your goal. Focus in on your intended purpose. Is the content intended to inform? Is the content intended to solve a problem? Without a purpose, content just isn’t worth reading, and your audience will catch onto that quickly. The end result is that your audience will lose confidence in your business and not respond with the desired action. Your content needs to provide something useful, valuable and insightful in order to encourage the reader to follow through on your call to action. Plus, giving purpose to your content builds a strong reputation for your brand and reduces your bounce rate.
Not Determining the Targeted Content Sales Funnel
The first step in avoiding some of the pitfalls of content marketing is to determine which sales funnel you want to target. Is it low, mid or top? Once you know the funnel, you can then create content that is appropriate. For example, potential customers in the low funnel are really just newbies. These folks are browsing for general information and still deciding which company to use. Be sure to provide these potential customers with basic, solid information about your brand and its products or services. Those at the top funnel already know something about your products or services and are seeking to determine if you’re the best company to go with. Be sure to provide content that is detailed and answers any questions that might be on their mind. When you focus in on your specific sales funnel, you’ll increase the number of clicks, gain brand recognition and encourage reader engagement. Just be sure to make the content interesting, add high quality image, make it relevant to your target audience and add a call to action.
Sticking with Just One Content Type
Many content marketers get stuck and just use one content type like blogs. It’s much better to get diverse and use all content avenues. Test the waters with other forms like infographics, email newsletters, case studies, white papers, videos and website content. White papers and case studies can help establish you as an authority in your niche. Infographics make it easy for those who don’t like long text to garner information. And with videos and email newsletters, you can engage your targeted audience and alert them to specials. The key takeaway here is that using just one content outlet will limit your audience and your brand’s reputation.
Failing to Measure Content Performance
If you don’t know what’s working and what’s not working, you can’t refine and improve your content marketing strategies. Businesses need to measure content performance through customer engagement, business revenue and quality leads. Are customers engaged and leaving comments on the content? Is the business making money from the content? Are quality leads being generated soon after the publishing of the content? Performance can and should be measured in a variety of ways, including social shares, registrations, downloads, website traffic and Google analytics. You can count on Google analytics for accurate data.
The goal of content marketing for businesses is to cultivate an audience base and generate sales. But reaching that goal is a process of steps. If you make the mistake of not implementing one step, the goal may not be achieved. Make your content purposeful, know which sales funnel you’re targeting, implement a variety of content types and measure the results of your content. While it takes time, effort and research, it’s worth it in the long run. You’ll be creating a good reputation for your brand and enhancing sales.
