Growing your startup or business isn’t easy. There are plenty of paths to choose from, and many involve a costly risk.
What if there was a proven way to increase brand awareness, drive traffic and boost sales?
Enter content marketing: the key to building your business.
Effectively utilizing content marketing provides a myriad of benefits for your emerging business, but be warned, it’s only as good as the business wielding it.
If mistakes are made then there are several possible pitfalls awaiting.
Here’s a comprehensive list of classic content marketing mistakes for you to learn from and avoid because believe me, the results will be worth it if you do.
10 Content Marketing Mistakes To Avoid
1. Working Without A Content Strategy
A content strategy is a plan in which you use content (audio, visual, and/or written) to achieve your business goals.- ,Hubspot
A content strategy aims to attract your target audience, engage them throughout their purchasing journey and ultimately, retain them as loyal customers.
A good content strategy will set out your priorities and define your goals. Once this outline has been completed you can then focus on creating high-quality content to achieve those goals.
A huge mistake many businesses make is not creating a content strategy. A result is a haphazard approach to releasing content that turns out lacklustre and ultimately doesn’t end up yielding any results.
Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK2Bn2_DFQ4
2. Not Optimizing Your Content
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the business of getting found online.
The SEO process aims to increase a business’s organic search results to drive organic traffic to the site.
To have your product/service become found in the Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERP) your content NEEDS to be optimized.
Optimized content ensures that you get as many eyes as possible on your content.
This will lead to a huge upsurge in traffic and sales.
3. Working Without Buyer Personas
Your Buyer Persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal target audience.
This is the person you designed your product/ service for in the first place. You want to grab their attention, their custom and ideally, their loyalty.
Seeing as this is the person you’re looking to convert, you need to tailor your content for them.
There is no point in creating content that attracts people if they’re not interested in your product/ service. It’s a waste of time and resources, and all the eyes in the world are no use if you don’t get that precious conversion.
4. Weak Production Pipeline
For content marketing to have the desired benefits for your business, you need to consistently create high-quality content and share it effectively through your channels.
The key word is consistency.
You need to make sure that you have a steady stream of excellent content at your disposal to churn out over time – it’s the only way to guarantee results.
To do that, ensure you have the right resources, infrastructure and skills to produce content.
Otherwise, you run the risk of your content fizzling out.
5. Not Maximizing Your Content’s Potential
As we know, it takes great effort to create great content.
Don’t let that effort go to waste by not marketing your content effectively.
Use social channels, start guest blogging, use blogging websites such as Medium and get it out there.
Remember that you should be spending as much time if not more in making sure you’re excellent content gets to as many people as possible!
6. Not Using Data To Build Your Strategy
Having a data-driven culture is essential in staying competitive in today’s marketplace.
A recent study by Harvard Business Review highlighted how “data and analytics should be the pulse of the organization, incorporated into all key decisions.”
This principle also rings true with content marketing.
Creating random content ideas will invariably lead to content that doesn’t work. Thus culminating in wasted time and resources.
For better results, use data to analyse the high-performing content out there and fine-tune your strategy accordingly.
7. Not Reviewing Your Content Marketing Performance
Once again, the devil is in the data.
By failing to take the time to analyze how your content is performing you can’t learn from your mistakes and evolve your approach.
By conducting reviews you can see what’s working- and double down on it.
You can also see what’s not working – and cut it out or change it up.
8. Creating Content With No Goal In Mind
The Buyer’s Journey is a three-stage process of:
- Awareness– becoming aware of their problem/ need.
- Consideration – researching their problem in more detail.
- Decision-making– shopping around for their best option.
Content is the key to guiding your prospective customers through their buyer’s journey in a natural way.
For your content to be effective and provide value to your reader it needs to sit in one of these three avenues.
Psst, this blog you’re reading now is in the “awareness” stage.
9. You’re Not Prioritizing Link Building
Link building is about increasing the number of inbound links to your webpage.
The more high-quality links you have, the higher your search engine ranking.
Build up the number of high-quality links and you’ll improve SEO and drive more traffic to your website.
This is it in action here for you to read up about it in more detail.
10. You’re Not Diversifying Your Content Approach
We’ve looked at the different types of content marketing and the different benefits they offer your business.
The important thing you need to remember is that out of all the people out there who fit under your buyer persona, many of them consume content differently.
Some will read blogs, others watch videos, many will listen to podcasts etc.
You need to make sure your diversifying your content approach, otherwise, you risk pigeon-holing yourself to one medium and missing out on eyes, leads and conversions.
The Founder Factory
Steer clear of these errors and your chances of success shoot up dramatically.
And we’re here to help.
At The Founder Factory, we’re going to be offering access to studios designated for film, podcasts, photo shoots and editing.
That’s not all.
We’re going to be offering digital marketing services and one-on-one’s to help you strategize your content approach and tailor the right fit for your business.
So, book a tour on our website or stay tuned by following us on LinkedIn, and join the exclusive cohort one of Ireland’s very first content creation house built by founders for founders.
There’s a content revolution coming…
Watch this space.
