Top 10 Content Marketing Mistakes That You Must Avoid

In today’s time producing high quality content has become the top most priority of the companies looking to empower their business online. If you too are running an online business, then this might be at the top of your business strategy list also. But producing quality content is not the only thing you need. In fact, there should be a proper content marketing strategy in place to bring the best possible results out of it.

With the above statement, we don’t mean that you don’t have a content marketing strategy. Obviously, when you are running an online business you must be having a well researched content marketing strategy in place. However, we have also seen many businesses to fail even after having an impactful content marketing plan. That’s because they don’t consider the little mistakes that one must avoid including you.

1. Targeting Unidentified Audience

In online marketing, there are companies and individuals who are well aware about the importance of content, and its quality. But still many of them fail to connect the chord with their audience via their content. That’s because they don’t set which audience to target and which not to, and start their journey by targeting everyone.

Therefore, while designing your content marketing strategy, one should always research and target the appropriate audience. For example, if you are into a business of selling kids clothes, you should target the middle aged people who are into the age group of 30-40 years instead of targeting the kids. As a young kid won’t be able to shop your product as he won’t be earning and also might not be interested to know about the quality of your product, newly launched designs, etc. But if you write keeping the targeted the middle aged people in your mind, you will be able to attract them to shop clothes from your eStore for their kids.

A Quick Tip:- If you are not sure about your target audience then try and picture your ideal clients or consumers and write keeping them in mind.

2. Start Creating Content without a Plan in Place

In most failed cases of content marketing, it has been observed that companies and individuals trying to make it big in their respective industry start creating content without its marketing plan in place. Like they don’t have any targets in mind nor they analyze the effectiveness of their content.

Creating content without a proper marketing plan is like moving in a direction without knowing your destination. With this, you might also end-up wasting your time and effort, as the chances of any fruitful outcome will stay close to Z.E.R.O.

A Quick Tip:- Before you start producing content, you must set certain milestones and set tight deadlines. This will help you analyze the worth of your content and efforts.

3. Not Able to Maintain the Content Quality

For online marketing, content can be produced in various forms, which include; Articles, Press Releases, Industry Reports, Videos, Whitepapers, Classifieds, etc. And on internet, content is considered as the king, so the quality of the content you produce should be top class.

But on many occasions, we have observed that companies as well as individuals try to save every possible penny they spend for content creation, and end-up outsourcing the task at extremely low rates. With this strategy in place, then end-up publishing low quality content due to which the trust and conversions for their websites suffer a lot.

Here you must understand that you should produce and publish the content not just for the sake of rankings on search engines, instead, you should maintain the content quality, for which you really need writer/people who can inspire your readers to take action.

To judge the content quality, don’t just put emphasis on grammar and punctuations. In fact, your content should be more about getting people to perform certain actions after reading your content.

A Quick Tip: To produce high quality content, spend time researching for the topics, grab knowledge about it, and start creating content that is useful and can be shared by your audience.

4. Pay no Attention to Marketing

Many people especially the beginners in content marketing believe that it is something which can change the fortune of their businesses within a few months if not days. Keeping this notion in mind, they start paying no attention to other marketing strategies. But that’s not true, and it can never be either.

Though we also believe that sale is one and only goal for businesses, and all your marketing efforts go in the same direction. And a sale can be generated or a lead can be converted into sales with high quality content. But that doesn’t mean you should start relying completely on your content and forget the need to market it.

No matter how good your content is, you can generate a sale without marketing it. As in fact, unless people find out your content, it’s nothing more than useless.

A piece of content can be marketed using a variety of SEO strategies, which include; guest posting, article submission on quality sites, online PR distribution, email marketing, paid advertising, etc. This will help you drive more and more people to your website and the content section. Once people start liking your daily or weekly dose of content, and start sharing it, you can start expecting the viral effect that you are in need of.

A Quick Tip: Either you should never start working on something that you don’t have a passion for or you should never stop leaving things in a mid-way. For example; even if you produce a great piece of content, don’t leave it aside and think that it will bring results for you. But in fact, you should explore ways to promote it so that it reaches to the targeted audience.

5. Creating Invaluable Content

Maintaining the overall quality in your content is always good. But have you ever thought what if your high quality content doesn’t relate to your targeted audience? This type of content is termed as invaluable content. Creating such content is nothing more than a waste of time for both you and your readers. As it will not bring in the expected results for you, and neither your audience will appreciate it because it won’t be of any help to them.

This is where the need to know your audience arises. But if you know your audience well, and still aren’t able to deliver what they expect from you will drive you towards failure only. Therefore, it’s necessary to create only and only a valuable content for the audience.

A Quick Tip: To know what your audience likes to read, you can run a short survey on your blog or via social media profiles. This will help you create the right content for right audience.

6. Not Providing References/Sources

On many occasions, we have noticed that there are plenty of bloggers, writers who write great content for the right audience, but still fail to connect the chord with them. After analyzing most of them, we found that they lack in proving the authenticity of their information, which can be avoided by citing your references or sources where from you get the respective information. Additionally, it even helps you build more trust among your readers, and the industry you write for as well.

A Quick Tip: Citing names of the authors and resources, which help you create a useful content for audience, is always a good practice to follow. It will make you popular in your circle, and build reputation.

7. Doesn’t Write Enough on Trending Topics

In content creation, there can never be a dearth of topics. You can easily get as many topics as you want to write on. But writing on every topic takes a lot of time, and it can only be done over a period of time. And you also need to classify your topics in two categories, which include; ever green and trending topics. However, many bloggers or content producers love to play safe i.e., they only write on ever green topics.

But that’s not a good strategy to follow if you really want to build great reputation amongst your readers. As there might be a time when a certain topic is in trend, and your readers are also interested to know what it is all about. In this situation, if they don’t find the required information on your site, they will probably move on to other sites.

Therefore, you must ensure that you also write on trending topics, which have a very short life, as they can bring enormous real & high quality traffic to your site, and may help you convert that into sales.

A Quick Tip: Always try to capitalize on trending topics as much as possible. This will leave an impression on your readers that you are an expert in your areas of writing and stays in touch with the industry news.

8. Self Promotion

Almost every individual expert and companies no matter how big or small they are start with the so called Self Promotion strategy, and end-up writing about who they are, what they do, how they do, why people should choose them, what makes them different, etc. But don’t you think the audience is more clever then all of us? Common, in today’s time everyone is well aware of this tactic. Hence people hardly trust these kinds of blogs or websites who brag about themselves a lot.

On the internet, people search for information which can help them solve their problems if any, so the only thing they need to know is its solution. They are least interested to know who you are, what you do, etc. Therefore, your priority should not be to create content that only speaks for you, but it should be something which relates to the audience and its problems.

A Quick Tip: If you start creating content that acts as a problem solver, very soon you may start to see the change in your sales figure.

9. Publishing Content only on Company Blog

Company blogs are pretty much required if you want to market your content and build trust and reputation amongst readers. But publishing your content only on company blog is not the right way to market it. Instead, you should try and expand your outreach to reach the targeted audience. For this, you also need to include a wide range of marketing channels that your probable customers use.

The best way to expand your reach is to create content in a variety of forms, which include; social, video, infographic, slide, email, eBooks, podcasts, guest post, etc.

A Quick Tip: By creating a diversified strategy for content creation you’ll be able to target your consumers in a much better way.

10. Concentrating only on Creating Content

As in the internet world, content is considered as the king, many people as well as companies concentrate only on creating content for marketing purposes. But that’s a very bad strategy to follow. Instead, you should also focus on other sorts of marketing methods, and keep creating content side by side. As content marketing is a slow process, which will provide you with results after a certain period of time and work. Therefore, it won’t be a good idea to leave other marketing methods just for the sake of content marketing.

A Quick Tip: Creating content is always a good idea to market yourself or business and promote your products & services. But don’t give up on other marketing channels unless your sales conversion rate is much more than any other medium.