The Top 7 Content Marketing Mistakes You Need To Stop Doing Today

Careless content marketing mistakes are costing businesses more than their monthly budget.

Blindly navigating your marketing strategy can cause your content to capsize. An ineffective strategy will both pause a business’s growth and decrease their probability of sales by 40%.

If your strategy ship is sinking, it’s not too late to anchor into a new method. Turn your mistakes into mastery and learn how to build an effective content marketing strategy that guarantees smooth sailing.

Quick Takeaways

• A great content marketing strategy creates brand awareness, drives traffic and generates quality leads
• Marketing content that includes interesting visuals receive 94% more views than that without
• Deliver consistent content by building a calendar dedicated to valuable blog topics
• A genuine connection with your target audience results in boosted visibility for your business
• Sourcing SEO experts and professional writers provides consistent marketing material for your business

Avoid content marketing mistakes by understanding the importance of building an effective strategy.

The Importance of Content Marketing

The secret to strong personal relationships starts with consistency, transparency and quality time. A content marketing strategy built upon the same principles enhances your customer relationships too.

The purpose of content marketing is to create brand awareness and generate quality leads. To get there, you must first connect with your target audience through regular delivery of valuable content.

Consistent delivery of quality content builds engagement with customers and trust within your community. Establishing presence and credibility leads to new business opportunities and growth in sales.

Image Source: Groove HQ

In a world so saturated with digital marketing, there’s little room for content marketing mistakes. Sweep your readers off their feet with genuine, relevant content to keep them coming back for more.

Top 7 Content Marketing Mistakes

High-quality content is expected and a strong marketing strategy is vital to survive. Make the most of your monthly marketing budget and stop making these 7 content marketing mistakes today.

1. Not Using Data To Build Your Content Marketing Strategy

Relying on intuitive instinct to define your content marketing strategy is a great way to waste time and money.

Knowing your business is a key part of driving traffic to your site. But defining a marketing strategy that’s guaranteed to show success requires leaving any guesswork to data.

Instead of channeling your higher self, evaluate competitor success. Use the highest ranking articles to determine which are driving the most ROI and accurately addressing SEO (more on that later, wink-wink). Then, ask yourself the following questions:

• How long are these posts?
• Is there value in recreating this content?
• Is there key information missing from this article?
• How many external links and backlinks are included?

Your answers will help determine which articles your team can improve. Pencil those babies into your content marketing calendar and voilà! You now have a list of content topics backed by data instead of divination.

2. Not Speaking To Your Target Audience

No matter how consistent your content is, it’s going to flop if your readers can’t relate.

Start each post with identifying your target audience and determine what needs to be included for readers to find value. When you share valuable content that educates and entertains, your audience will trust that you’ve got more where that came from.

When your audience feels seen, they’re also likely to repost your content throughout their personal networks. More than 50% of content in social media news feeds comes directly from peers. It’s likely that you’ll reap the benefits of a visibility boost and even gain more loyal readers.

Image Source: Sprout Social

3. Failing to Focus on Link Building

Contrary to popular belief, linking to websites other than your own will actually drive traffic to your business as opposed to away.

Link building provides your readers with references and enhances credibility. This gives Google the green flag that your content is trustworthy. It also improves SEO and offers added value to readers, all resulting in boosted visibility and your business ranking higher.

If you’re feeling frisky, start mingling with sites that post similar content and start building a relationship. After getting to know each other, you may find they’re the perfect match for embedding links back to each other’s content. We like to call that “love at first site”.

Enjoy the short video below to learn more about the importance of link building.

Video Source: Yoast

4. Publishing Too Little Content or Too Infrequently

Posting an optimal amount of content can be tricky, especially if it’s your first time dipping your toes in the pool of content marketing.

The key is understanding that more content isn’t helpful if it’s not focused on delivering value. Publishing a little bit of content won’t make a noticeable impact either, even if it’s quality material.

Successful content creation requires coming up with a solid plan and sticking to it. To see increased brand awareness, your businesses should stick to 1 – 2 blog posts per week and between 1,000 – 1,200 words per week.

Image Source: Orbit Media

When it comes to publishing content, consistency is key. Loyal audiences require content calendars dedicated to valuable blog topics. This way, you’ll never fall short on good marketing material.

5. Not Outsourcing Experts

Are you sitting down? Because we’re about to drop a bomb on ya.

75% of people never scroll past the first page of search engines. That means you’ll need sharp SEO skills if you haven’t outsourced an expert to help your business rank on Google.

Luckily, there’s plenty of content marketing agencies like ours that help businesses grow by providing perfected SEO and written content to their clients.

Great SEO is key to ranking, reaching and engaging your audience through including highly searched keywords in marketing content. Valuable content that jives with SEO research will land you on the first page. Misuse of keywords will send you to the back of the line.

Equally as important as SEO experts, quality writers are key to generating valuable content. Online editing and creation tools are great for correcting grammatical errors. Only professional writers can consistently produce engaging, human-powered content that appeals to real people.

Don’t miss out on optimized value by relying on overworked internal personnel to do a job that requires a dedicated expert. Kick-starting your content strategy is as simple as leaving it in the hands of an SEO researcher and creative writer.

6. Not Diversifying Your Content Marketing Avenues

Once upon a time , someone told you that the secret recipe for perfect content marketing calls for boosting your blog posts. Although blogging is an important way to drive traffic, there’s some key ingredients missing from your strategy.

Think about your ROI-driven content topics and determine which formats work best. Consider videos, interviews, social media, case studies and e-books. Add some flavor to your marketing strategy by mixing a variety of avenues into your content.

Image Source: HubSpot

7. Lacking Design, Creative and Graphics

According to LinkedIn, articles that include visuals receive 94% more views than those without. An effective marketing strategy doesn’t overlook the importance of creative content design.

Great visual content is key to creating easy-to-read articles that engage your audience. Each post should have at least one image between every 200-300 words to break up text. Similarly, including a video less than 2 minutes long can both boost visual appeal and improve SEO.

A good rule of thumb is that if you don’t want to read it, neither does your audience. Enhance the value of your content by adding a few pictures, videos and engaging text.

Master Marketing Today

Content marketing mistakes are easy to avoid when you know where they’re hiding. Master content marketing and enhance customer relationships, create brand awareness and generate quality leads.

Secure a successful strategy today with our content marketing experts. Drive traffic to your site and publish quality content by checking out our weekly blogging service now.