Megan Sashyl
Content marketing is one of the best investments that your company can make. It increases traffic and brings high-quality leads, so it’s no wonder why so many organizations are on board.
However, successful content marketing often means scaling several hurdles. The market is saturated, which means mistakes and missed opportunities can be costly. It’s therefore important your business gets it right with its content marketing strategy in order to achieve optimal results.
Here’s a review of six costly mistakes most businesses make with their content marketing strategy – plus how to avoid them.
Not promoting content enough
Content marketing does not end after a post goes live on an authority blog page. Most content marketers make the mistake of stopping at that point, but that’s a mistake. That is not the stop point. You need to go further and consistently push the content before the target audience for it to have maximum impact.
Industry experts at InfintechDesigns.com white label content marketing advise that marketers spend more time promoting content than creating it. They say a smart approach is to apply the 80/20 principle, which means spending 80% of your time promoting the content on social media networks, emails, forums and other online channels. The rest 20% is time that should be spent creating the content.
Not creating enough content throughout the sales funnel
There are various phases of the buying cycle and as such, when producing content, it is crucial that marketers analyse each one of them. For example, if you concentrate too much time and effort on creating informative content that appeals to those in the sales funnel stage of awareness, you may miss out on nurturing buyers down the buying cycle.
For each step of the sales funnel, marketers should look to generate adequate content. Although informative blog posts are essential to understanding, material including case studies and ebooks do need to be produced for the later stages of the marketing process as well.
Not having a content approval process
Creating content is a lot more than crafting a piece and getting it published. But before it gets to the live stage, the piece needs to be checked and rechecked by teammates and the client. This peer review mechanism is vital to ensure approved content maximizes every element and has a chance of getting published fast.
Most marketers love using spreadsheets or emails to do the content approval process, but solely relying on these strategies might slow the team down and negatively impact on client relationships. You could easily lose track of client approvals and feedback and thus fail to meet a client deadline.
Marketers need to ensure they have a fast and effective content approval process in place. They can create a content review and approval template that includes each stage and timeline.
Marketers may also use a quality management tool or app for prompt content planning, creation, review and approval. The app can help monitor updates and improvements and remove the need for complicated spreadsheets and endless email chains – all in a single place.
Not reviewing content marketing performance
Not having the opportunity or taking time to review the success of their actions is one of the greatest errors marketing teams can make. There’s no way of understanding what is or isn’t working without looking at the details.
For instance, if a piece of content performs well, marketers can consider ways to repurpose it or rely on that particular strategy. And if the content performs badly, that also helps to provide useful insights on what works and what doesn’t, so the team can focus on successful content strategies.
Reviewing digital marketing performance with the rest of the team is critical, at least periodically. Engagement metrics such as page visits, social media impressions, and the time guests spent looking at content items will help marketing continue to develop and finetune their strategies.
Not paying attention to user-generated content
User-generated content refers to any unpaid content created by users. This can vary from pictures and videos to reviews and blog posts. Statistics show 70% of people trust photos that come from consumers like themselves, instead of images created by brands.
Marketers who disregard user-generated content miss a huge opportunity to create customer trust – not to mention outsourcing user-generated content will save marketers time and money.
Marketers can begin to integrate user-generated content by exploring what encourages their audience to create content and interact with their brand. The use of social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram is an ideal means of managing a user-generated content program.
Conclusion
With careful planning and a diligent approach, marketing managers can avoid falling victim to any of the listed common content marketing traps and similar ones. There is a lot for marketers to consider when creating an effective campaign, from implementing a content approval process to creating content that spans the whole selling funnel. Those who can get it right will enjoy the benefits of their content marketing efforts.
