Content marketing is a very important part of branding and scaling your business. It’s also one of the best ways to increase your revenue. However, not everyone gets it right the first time. You can be posting on different online platforms every day and not win a single lead. This can be a waste of time, energy, and resources.
If you’re unsatisfied with the results of your content marketing campaigns or if you’re only starting out and you want to make sure you hit your targets with the right content marketing results, read on.
This article is for anyone who wants to step up their game in content marketing and scale their business like never before.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a popular form of marketing that focuses on the creation and publication of valuable and relevant content to generate leads and make sales.
The content involved in content marketing can come in any of the following forms:
- Blog posts
- Photo and video content
- Social media posts
- Podcasts
- Newsletters
- E-books
- White paper
Why is content marketing important?
The goal of content marketing is not just to generate more sales. Instead, it values and builds the connection between your business and your audience through trust, relevance, and value.
Here are some of the reasons why content marketing is important for your business:
Establishes brand credibility
Your content can help you establish your expertise in your industry. You can produce blog articles or social media posts that indicate you are an expert in your niche, such as answering your customers’ common questions. According to studies, 78% of B2B consumers choose sites or businesses that they find trustworthy.
With content marketing, you can show that you can help solve your customers’ problems, and that makes your brand more credible to your audience.
Grows your audience
As you produce more customer-centric content, you open the opportunity to build your audience. When your customers know that they can count on you for their needs related to your industry, you also win their trust.
Builds a community around your brand
Content marketing makes it possible to build a strong community around your brand. As you consistently produce more content that your target audience finds valuable, you create a stronger and more engaged community, bringing the same kind of people that can turn into paying customers.
Helps you generate leads and increase conversions
Content marketing also helps you attract leads and increase conversions. The more content you produce, the higher the chances of your target audience seeing them. This also increases the likelihood of conversions, which is important to a growing business.
Improves SEO and drives organic traffic from search engines
SEO or search engine optimization is responsible for ranking higher in relevant searches. When a user searches a specific topic online, search engines such as Google rummage through the entire internet for the most relevant pages it thinks the user needs. It uses advanced technology to crawl websites that contain keywords typed in by the user.
This is where content marketing comes in handy. The more content you put out that’s related to your business or industry, the more likely it is for search engines to find you and recommend your page to your target audience. This eventually drives organic traffic which is useful for your business.
Boosts user engagement and retention
Content marketing helps boost customer engagement and retention with content that targets the different phases of the customer’s journey. This can be attention-grabbing emails, entertaining social media posts, or valuable video and blog posts that customers can apply to their lives or their businesses.
Builds relationships with clients
Finally, content marketing is useful when it comes to building relationships with clients. Content is everywhere. This makes it easy to connect with customers wherever they are and provide solutions to their problems however you can.
15 Content Marketing Mistakes
Because content marketing involves a variety of media and targets different phases of your customers’ journeys, it can be easy for you to get overwhelmed or do so much without really accomplishing anything.
Here are 15 most common mistakes in content marketing that can potentially waste your time, money, and effort.
1. Creating content without a clear strategy
Content marketing is more than just producing different kinds of content. To reach your goal as a business, you need a clear map — a strategy so you produce more cohesive, purposeful, and consistent content that can actually generate, convert, and retain leads.
2. Not creating or posting for your audience
Content marketing places your audience at the center of everything you do. This means an effective content marketing strategy requires an understanding of who you are creating content for. Otherwise, you may be sending a message to the wrong crowd and waste your efforts over nothing.
3. Selling too hard
Content marketing is also all about providing value or solutions. In other words, hard-selling won’t cut it. You can sell your products or services in every single content you publish and it may come off as annoying or too salesy. It lacks genuineness and appears fake.
4. Posting low-quality content
Let’s face it. People tend to judge a book by its cover. In content marketing, this entails that the crappier your content is, the less likely it is for your audience to consume, much less engage. One great quality blog post that provides so much value to your customers might attract more customers than ten blog posts that are written just for the sake of it.
5. Not Optimizing Your Content for Search Engines
According to studies, search engines drive the most traffic to your website, so don’t forget to optimize your content for search engines. In fact, 51% of content consumption comes from organic search. This includes adding the right keywords and optimizing images so the algorithm can find your page better and you can rank higher in search results.
6. Not gauging the most effective channels
It can be tempting to be everywhere, on all online platforms. However, you might be spreading yourself too thin, spending time on platforms where your target customers are not even on.
Instead of wasting time and energy on channels that do not generate leads, focus on the ones that do. Identify which channels bring the most lead conversions and spend more time and effort there instead.
7. Only using one channel to distribute content
It is unhelpful to manage so many channels to distribute content, but choosing to use only one channel is even more ineffective. Avoid limiting your reach by sticking to one platform alone.
8. Giving up after trying only one strategy
There is no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy that ensures business success. So if you fail after one strategy, try something else. Content marketing involves multiple strategies that you can try.
For example, if your podcast didn’t do so well in terms of engagement and lead conversions, that does not mean you can’t try to work on social media content.
9. Publishing content with no calls to action
One of the most common mistakes in content marketing is forgetting to add a call to action to your content. Although it can be annoying when a content becomes too salesy, that does not mean forgoing calls to action entirely.
Don’t waste the opportunity to win a customer. Even a simple invitation to sign up for your newsletter or an invitation to download an ebook can help increase your conversion rates.
10. Trying to be everything to everyone instead of focusing on a specific audience
Being everything to everyone can hurt your branding. It muddles with your brand voice such that you are no longer recognizable to people. Poor branding leads to poor engagement and, eventually, poor conversions.
Your goal is to reach your target customers, so try to focus on a specific audience. When you understand your audience better, you are able to improve your message and provide more value.
11. Making it hard for readers to share your content
When it’s difficult for your readers to share your content, you miss the opportunity to get organic traffic.
You can improve your content and make it easy to share by producing content with more relevant topics, and adding social media buttons on your page.
12. Publishing too much or too little content
A question many marketers ask is how much published content is too much or too little. There is no one clear answer here, but it is important to understand that the more content you have, the better the chances of getting organic traffic.
However, high quantities of content still won’t matter if your audience doesn’t find them relevant or valuable. Many businesses churning too much content end up losing quality. At the end of the day, quality still matters more than quantity.
13. Not being consistent in your design
Consistency is key to good branding. When your content design and features are consistent, your brand becomes more familiar to your audience as well. Brand recognition is extremely important in building relationships with your customers.
To improve your design consistency, stick to the same color palette and visual elements when creating content.
14. Ignoring analytics and insights
Numbers don’t lie. If you want to improve your business performance, it is important to pay attention to analytics and insights. This way, you will know which strategies work and which ones do not.
15. Focusing on quantity over quality
The secret to effective content marketing is not the quantity of your published content but its quality. Your audience doesn’t really care if you have published too much or too little this week. However, they will mind if you are producing low-quality content.
Instead of fixating on how much content you produce, focus on creating content with better quality that your audience will enjoy.
How much time should I invest in content marketing?
Content marketing is not an overnight process. It requires careful planning, production, and monitoring. Therefore, it can take months before you can see the results. However, this still depends on the channel you are focusing on and the strategy you have put in place.
While content marketing is universally agreed to be beneficial to your business, not all business owners have the time, knowledge, or skills to run an entire content marketing campaign.
If you don’t know where to start with content marketing or if you simply do not have the resources, you can outsource this essential task to content marketing experts like LeadOrigin.
Why do I need a content marketing strategy?
Content marketing is not just posting whatever content you want online. It is an entire marketing process that requires a good strategy to be effective.
If you want to generate more leads, build a better customer relationship, and increase your conversions, you need to prioritize content.
How do you measure the success of a content marketing campaign?
In order to find out if your content marketing strategy is working and if it is contributing to your business goals, measure your results through the following KPIs:
- Revenue (sales, subscriptions, downloads)
- Brand awareness (web traffic, page views, etc.)
- Customer retention (subscriptions or unsubscriptions, bounce rates, etc.)
- Engagement (comments, likes, shares, retweets)
- Leads (newsletter subscriptions, request forms or emails, conversion rates)
Using content marketing to scale your business
Content marketing is interesting, and it can be extremely valuable for your business. However, it can take a lot of work.
To make the most out of the available channels where you can market your brand, take the time to research content marketing strategies and understand how your target audience behaves so you can meet them where they are.
Because customers’ behavior and the digital world are constantly changing, businesses need to keep up to stay ahead of the game and stand out from the tough online competition.
For effective implementation and better results, getting a good content marketing team for your business is important. Instead of spending a lot of time and money on learning the process of content marketing, you can hire experienced content marketing experts who specialize in content marketing campaigns.
LeadOrigin can help strategize a content marketing campaign that is tailored to your business goals. Learn how we can help your business grow with content marketing through a free digital marketing consultation.