Content marketing can be a great way to grow your business. Often, it can be cheaper than traditional marketing, and can grow your business in the long term. That being said creating mountains of content can be time consuming. Because of this you’ll need to be smart about how you choose to spend your time. However, with a little forward thinking you’ll be able to avoid any mistakes that might arise.
In this article we’re going to cover the five most common mistakes that occur during a content marketing campaign. Avoiding these mistakes are crucial, if you want to execute an effective campaign.
1. Not writing to an audience
You’ll need to take your audience’s needs into account every time you produce a new piece of content. By setting aside the time to focus on your audience you can create something with better certainty that it will fulfill the needs of your audience.
Build an audience profile on the pieces that have been most successful. This will help you to imitate this success and build upon it in the future. If you don’t take the time to position yourself in the beginning there’s a good chance you may actually be positioning yourself in the opposite direction of the audience you’re trying to attract.
2. Your content and brand are misaligned
One of the greatest ways to ensure your brand and content strategy are aligned is to create evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that isn’t based upon trends or timely information, so it will serve the needs of your audience, potentially forever.
These pieces of content should be seen as staples of your brand and can help you to establish authority within your niche. You’ll want your content to act as pillars that are holding up your brand.
When your brand and content are misaligned this can bring a lot of confusion to the reader, which is never positive.
3. Not enough outreach
When you create content you’ll want to ensure you’re distributing it effectively through various social media platforms, as well as other channels. If you’re simply writing for your own site you’re missing out on a lot of potential opportunities. Especially for traffic.
Whenever you create a piece of content be sure to distribute it across a variety of social media platforms. It can also help to publish content on other blogs and websites within your niche as well, in the form of guest posting.
4. Selling too much
The newest currency of the web is trust. If you’re doing things that erode this trust in the eyes of your readers, then your content strategy isn’t working.
Value should be at the center of everything you produce. If you’re using the content you create to simply sell your products and services, then you’re bound to lose out on long term sales. By focusing on providing value over the long term, you’ll be left with a bunch of loyal customers who are happy to buy your products and promote your work.
By reviewing the mistakes above you’ll be able to ensure you’re setting up your content marketing campaign for success.
Written By Jason Brietstein
