Do You Make These 5 Stupid Content Marketing Strategy Mistakes?

Everybody makes mistakes – that’s the nature of business. But, smart business owners learn from the mistakes of others so they don’t waste time and money making mistakes on their own. In our years of analyzing the market, we have seen plenty of content marketing strategy decisions that have gone right and wrong.

These are some of the top content marketing mistakes your company could make:

1. No Content Marketing Strategy

There’s no wrong or right content marketing strategy. What’s most important is not the strategy itself, but that you actually have one in place.

Make sure you have goals set for your campaign. Do you want to make more sales soon, build your list, increase your search rankings, or get more traffic?

Set your goals, follow through, and adjust as necessary.

2. Forgetting Keyword Research

You shouldn’t use “natural language.” Okay, you should when writing, but that may or may not help you rank for the keywords your content marketing strategy would benefit most from.

For example, you could write a blog article titled “How to Reduce Taxes You Owe.” That’s helpful, but let’s say people are really searching for “Tips for Reducing Your Taxes” when you do keyword research.

In both cases, you’ve written a very helpful post. But people will only find you for the latter because that’s what keyphrase they’re searching for. Make sure every piece of content targets 1-3 keyphrases.

3. Not Enough Value Offered

The whole idea behind content marketing strategy is so your audience comes away with more valuable information than they had before. Your content must be entertaining, actionable, or help your audience learn something new.

Remember to answer the question “What’s in it for me?” as best as you can and you’ll do just fine.

4. Not Enough Promotion

“Build it and they will come” does not work. There’s simply too much content these days to make that a viable strategy. You should put at least the same effort into promotion as you do into content creation. Some experts recommend promoting content five times more than you spend creating it.

5. Your Headlines are Clever, Not Clear

Clever works best to engage once you’ve written your content. Headlines, however, must give an exact indication of what the reader can expect to find once they read your content. You can be somewhat clever too, but the focus should always be clarity.

Do you know the magazine rack at your local grocery store? It seems amazing to you that anyone buys those magazines. But a large part of the reason they get bought is they have incredible headlines that inspire wonder and awe. A certain segment of our population simply cannot resist buying them.

Conclusion

If you avoid making those mistakes, you’ll fly by most SMBs in your next content marketing campaign. For more information on how we have helped other companies develop their content marketing strategy, learn more about our content marketing services by clicking the link. As always, contact us now if you have any further questions.