Content is an expression of your brand’s values, priorities, and expertise. It can also be a powerful engine to drive your business to meet its goals.
With solid strategy and execution, content can be a smart tool to elevate your brand. Unfortunately, anything as influential and impactful as content marketing also has the potential to greatly hinder your brand if you’re not careful to avoid these common mistakes.
Classic Content Marketing Mistakes
1. Writing Around Your Audience
We often hear frustration from brands and fellow marketers when the content they’re creating just doesn’t seem to be landing. More often than not, we’ve found that this doesn’t happen because the content itself is lacking in quality, but because it wasn’t intentionally written for a specific audience.
When your content speaks to topics that exist outside of your target audiences’ niche interests, needs, or experiences, it will almost always flop — no matter how well-written it is. And, even when that content is informed by audience data and catered to your consumers, it still has to be used strategically for it to successfully reach them in the first place.
How to Avoid this Mistake:
Our general rule of thumb is that if your content doesn’t answer a question or offer a solution (and at the same time also resonate with your target audiences’ experiences), then it probably isn’t going to perform well because it isn’t offering them any genuine value. It’s equally important to strategically publish and thoughtfully position your content for your intended audiences. Make sure that you are the one initiating those interactions rather than waiting (hoping) for them to find your content by accident.
2. Creating Without Clear Goals
No matter the industry, audience, or initiative it’s being made for, we’ve found that the single most important question to ask when creating a new piece of content is always the same one: “Why?”
Content isn’t nearly as effective, if at all, when it doesn’t have a purpose. The purpose of your content has to support your business goals – think of that as the pre-requisite for existing in the first place. Your content also needs to fulfill a clear purpose for your audience. If content is expected to perform well, it cannot exist solely to further the business at the loss of the audience and vice versa.
How to Avoid this Mistake:
The best way to ensure your content is successfully supporting your marketing efforts and moving the needle for your brand is to identify clear, measurable goals that are incorporated into your content strategy. Outlining your KPIs (key performance indicators) at the onset of your content strategy development process will allow you to make more informed decisions about any adjustments or improvements that may be needed later on.
3. Taking SEO Shortcuts
Search traffic isn’t going anywhere. Knowing this, one would think that dedicating proper time and attention to your SEO strategy is a no-brainer. And yet, SEO is still an underutilized tool in most content marketing approaches we see.
Some brands cite timing concerns or a lack of general understanding as the root causes of their SEO shortcomings. But, regardless of the culprit, the results are always the same. Taking shortcuts with your SEO or neglecting it altogether is a great way to undermine your content marketing efforts by severely limiting your content’s visibility, potential engagement, and overall effectiveness.
How to Avoid this Mistake:
Bottom line: developing a thorough SEO strategy will always be worth your time, effort, and investment. Taking the extra time up-front to properly research and implement SEO best practices across your active platforms while simultaneously incorporating them into your content creation process will inevitably result in higher traffic volumes and improved content performance, yielding better results on all fronts.
4. Skipping Routine Performance Reviews
The most effective content strategies always, always, always, start with solid data. How effective can your content truly be if you have no indication of who engaged with it, how it performed, or how it compares to your competition? Failing to take the time to review their content performance is one of the biggest mistakes a business can make. Content performance reviews provide invaluable data to help you determine if your resources are being spent on the right content and channels.
How to Avoid this Mistake:
We recommend conducting a performance review of your content marketing efforts once a month if possible, or at least every quarter if monthly check-ins aren’t realistic for you and your team. Keeping a close eye on the performance of individual content pieces as well as the platforms and channels you’re using to deliver them is the best way to monitor your strategy goals while giving yourself the chance to proactively refine or build off of that strategy as needed.
5. Keeping up with the Joneses
Nobody likes a copycat. And no, we’re not referring to plagiarized work (although of course that is a big, fat “don’t you dare”). We’re talking about the times you only keep an Instagram account for your brand because you think you have to or when you publish blogs on topics that match your competition just because you think you need to keep up.
Your brand does not have to do anything except be 1) true to itself and 2) distinct.
How to Avoid this Mistake:
Being yourself is hard enough, let alone running a brand that sets itself apart. But that is what brands are for! If your brand blends in with all of your competitors and then goes on to regurgitate the same information as everyone else, who is that helping?
A brand audit is the first step in identifying where you currently stand in relation to your competitors. Then the hard work of building a distinctive brand can begin. If your brand is in a good spot, however, and it is truly a content problem, then you can go a few levels deeper and run a content audit. If you trust yourself to be brutally honest with yourself and your team, you can DIY this. But there is nothing quite like getting a fresh, outside perspective to aid you in this process.
Safeguard Your Content Marketing
Whether your strategy is still in development or actively evolving, at CID, we know first-hand that having the dedicated support of a capable and collaborative team is the key to safeguarding your content marketing efforts and maximizing their impact. From getting you started on the right path to supporting you with the tools and insights to make the most of your current capabilities, our multi-disciplined crew of content strategists and creators is always adapting, always pushing the boundaries of possibility, and most importantly, always in your corner.
Are you overdue for a content strategy reset, revamp, or relaunch? Contact CID to get started today!
"Bring in the Klinkhammer," they said...and we did! Amy is part of our award-winning marketing & strategy team where she writes for ads, email, the web, video and so much more. She also drinks too much coffee and spends too much time debating the Oxford comma.