Content marketing, a popular marketing approach that is used to increase customer engagement and brand awareness to drive higher revenue, has been a boon for businesses. One success story in content marketing comes from food conglomerate Kraft. According to AdAge, the firm now generates 1.1 billion ad impressions per year worldwide, with a four-times better return on investment via content marketing than through targeted advertising. Content marketing is having such an impact that not only are newcomers joining, but the current players are investing more.
Content Marketing Institute claims 70 percent of marketers are creating more content than they did last year. Moreover, 55 percent of marketers plan to increase budgets. Sounds great, right? The real problem here is that the quantity of content will continue to increase to the point of over-saturation in the market, and your articles will soon be buried.
To avoid this, a skilled marketer does not only invest more but invests smartly. Nobody is perfect, but you can surely minimize mistakes. Here are five common mistakes made by marketers when thinking about content strategy. Avoiding these thought processes will help you stand out among the competition.
Strategy isn’t so important. I know what I’m doing
Not everybody takes building a content marketing strategy seriously. Even if some do, the strategy might not be well-documented. Content Marketing Institute says 27 percent of B2C marketers have a documented content marketing strategy, and 50 percent have one but it is not documented. In other words, there is no clear strategy on the books for future employees to look at or build upon.
If you do not have a clear strategy, or any strategy at all, it means you will probably just copy what others do. What others do might not fit your company well or might even be counterproductive. Actually, creating a strategy might not be that difficult. Gather your team, develop a strategy, and write it down. Fine tune it as you learn what works and what doesn’t. If you are clueless on how to start, this website offers great help.
Any content is fine, as long as I keep updating
The second common mistake is assuming that any content will work. Rather than spending little effort, time, and money to create a lot of mediocre content, your resources are better spent creating a single piece of content that brings a greater impact. Poor content not only has zero value, it can also drive away your existing audience. Here are some tips:
- Make it fun!
- Do not focus in selling; what you want is to engage.
- Visual content works better than plain text.
Content creation equals content promotion
Already have a great strategy with high-quality content? Great! Are you finished? No. You must never forget the next step: promotion and distribution. As mentioned before, there are millions of content marketing materials out there. The only way to make yours reachable is to promote it. Furthermore, if you want to reach the right target audiences, having a content distribution strategy is paramount. The way you choose to promote and distribute is up to you and really depends on your goal. To better understand the difference between promotion and distribution, check out this article.
I want instant results
You have done everything in your power to get your well-crafted content in front of your target audience. It’s time to determine whether it was a success or failure. All you want is an instant answer. Be patient. It could take hours, days, weeks, even months before your content starts gaining traction. If you are receiving great feedback, keep it up. If not, never give up. Instead, do something to fix what is wrong. Don’t resign to failure considering how much you have invested.
Be data-driven and let it flow
Once you achieve success with a certain kind of story, never let it go. Don’t let your writers revert back to the previous formula. There is always room for improvement. Even when you think you have reached perfection, remember that trends change. Your perfect content will grow obsolete as time moves on. Keep evaluating your articles, and use your stats to determine which articles to mimic and iterate upon going forward. To a seasoned media pro, this advice may seem elementary, but you’d be surprised at how many people actually do ignore their own data!
