When building brand awareness and expanding your audience, content marketing is the name of the game. Whether you take care of it in-house or partner with a digital marketing agency, it’s one of the best things you can do to meet your goals.
Unfortunately, many companies fall short in a few areas and wind up with a lot of wasted effort. So, what pitfalls should you avoid with your content strategy? Find a breakdown of the most common mistakes below.
Overlooking SEO
If you’re running a content marketing campaign, on-page SEO (search engine optimization) is a critical component that shouldn’t be overlooked. Essentially, SEO is what helps drive search engine traffic to your website. It’s in your best interest to create on-page content that tells Google and other search engines your site is relevant, trustworthy, and that it provides value.
Not Including a Variety of Content
Optimized web page copy and blog posts definitely go a long way, and yet focusing on only traditional on-page text is a common content marketing mistake. Variety is the spice of life, and it’s also a vital aspect of successful digital marketing campaigns.
Have you considered downloadable infographics or white papers? How about animations, how-to videos, or webinars? Then there’s live content, podcasts, memes, GIFs, and of course, social media posts. While you don’t have to use every one of these types of content, implementing at least a few will help you connect with a broader audience, drive traffic to your site, boost your SEO, and ultimately, benefit your bottom line.
Not Researching Audience Personas
Failing to research audience personas is a bad content marketing habit. Even if you have a decent idea of who your target market is, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not looking into their demographic traits, buyer habits, motivations, and challenges. Researching your audience personas will provide you with insight not only on the types of content to create but also the messaging, verbiage, and mediums to use.
Not Creating Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is always relevant. This means the messaging is meaningful and useful year-round, and preferably year after year.
Seasonal or topical content is undoubtedly beneficial, and it may be necessary for your brand. That said, including evergreen pieces can provide you with the most return on investment, and you can continue to use them over and over again. Not only that, but consumers will get value out of your content no matter when they come across it.
Not Having a Promotion Strategy
Another error marketers often make is not having a content promotion strategy. After creating and uploading a blog post, video, infographic, or podcast, you’re not off the hook as soon as you hit publish. A promotion strategy might involve sharing your content on all social media channels, tagging collaborators, linking or embedding it into your on-page copy, or distributing it through an email campaign.
Not Updating Your Content Regularly
If you enter a search term into Google, you’ll probably see that the top hits were published relatively recently, usually within the last few months or year. Why? Since many industries and topics change rapidly, this provides consumers with the most relevant, accurate, and current information. You can always publish new content, but updating your existing pieces will send a signal to Google that it’s new. In turn, this can improve your search rankings and drive more traffic to your site.
Not Tracking Your Performance
One of the biggest pitfalls of content marketing is not tracking performance. When you spend valuable time and money on content creation, you should have clearly defined KPIs (key performance indicators). This will tell you what’s working, what needs to be adjusted, and areas where you might want to cut down moving forward.If you want help fine-tuning your content strategy or need assistance in tracking your performance, drop us a line at Mad Fish Digital.