Five of the Most Common Content Marketing Mistakes—And What to Do Instead

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Content is one of the most important factors to consider when you aim for higher search engine rankings. The content you create needs to be helpful and relevant to your customers.

And yet, content marketing can be challenging, and there are many mistakes you can make. In this article, we'll cover five of the most common content marketing mistakes and what you can do to avoid them.

Many marketers will formulate content ideas ad hoc. But without looking at your data, you won't know which content items are performing and which are not. That means you could be creating content that drives few results because it doesn't resonate with your customers.

The same goes for not using customer insights. Knowing your customers and audience is one of the biggest advantages you can have when developing marketing content. Knowing what appeals to your customers, what problems they face, and what they are interested in will help in formulating your content strategy.

Common signs of this first mistake include lower-quality traffic, high bounce rates, and low conversion rates. If you experience any of those, it may be time to change how you formulate your content marketing strategy.

There's a lot of data you can use to measure and analyze the results of your content marketing campaigns. Their performance can help you set KPIs and SMART goals to guide and track the success of future content campaigns.

To gain insights into your customers, you need to develop buyer personas. A semi-fictional representation of your customer, a buyer persona is a helpful tool for appealing to and targeting the right customers with relevant, meaningful, and helpful content.

Many businesses make the mistake of creating a piece of content and then publishing it straight to their website, blog, or social channels without even checking it.

Before any content goes out, you should have a peer or colleague review it, at the very least. However, if you have lots of content contributors, including guest contributors, it can be difficult to manage and keep track of reviewing content.

You want the content that you publish to match the style, tone, and voice of your brand. A content-review process can ensure that the content you publish matches your brand, as well as correct mistakes and inaccuracies.

To create a manageable content reviewing process, consider using a content management or a project management platform. There are lots of free platforms you can use to keep track of content creation and development, including whether the content is awaiting review.

Whether it's just updating your blog with a new post or sharing the same type of content on social media over and over, you could be guilty of making this content marketing mistake.

The same also goes for not creating evergreen or reusable content. Evergreen content is content that remains relevant and fresh for your readers. That means it continues to generate traffic long after you've published it.

Content that is not evergreen:

Reusable content is also a good option for making sure you don't limit your content types. Reusable content can be published in multiple formats. For example, you may have a blog post that you can later rework into an infographic.

To avoid repetitiveness in your strategy, consider using different content types the next time you develop content.

This mistake links to the previous one:, If you aren't using a variety of content types, chances are you aren't creating content for every stage of the buyer's journey.

That also means you are letting valuable leads go to waste. You may create content that works effectively at attracting leads, but then nothing to nurture those leads toward converting.

The buyer's journey has three basic stages:

At the awareness stage, you need to create content that informs and educates buyers about the problem they are experiencing.

At the consideration stage, you need to create content that explains how to solve the buyer's problem.

Finally, at the decision stage, you can go all-out with branded content to persuade the buyer you are the correct choice for solving the problem they need solved.

If the bulk of your content promotes your brand or products, you're making another content marketing mistake. You shouldn't be trying to push a sale every time you publish content.

It's ineffective, and continually sharing overly promotional content is a good way to lose followers and potential leads.

The content you create shouldn't be about your business and what you can do for customers. It should be about the customers and what they can get out of the content. Whenever you create content, stop and think whether the customer will get any value from it.

Use the 80-20 rule to limit promotional posts. To prevent boring your customers, 80% of your content should be helpful and of value to them. The other 20% can be promotional.

Have you made any of the mistakes outlined in this article? Becoming aware of the mistakes and then solving them will improve your content marketing , drive higher-quality traffic, and boost conversions.

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