Guest post by Atman Rathod
Whether it’s web or social media or mobile apps, it’s still the content that dominates every digital space. With the proliferation of digital channels, there’s been an increased demand for content marketing. Simultaneous to this growth in demand, marketers also have made a lot of mistakes that pull down content marketing output. Since you can easily learn from these mistakes, I’m going to explain some of these common mistakes and their antidotes.
First of all, you need to have a content strategy that fits the nature and niche of your business. When it comes to B2B content marketing, you need to focus more on expertise and for directly targeting end-users to create informed content that helps users to make decisions. For instance, content on mobile app development tips will be expertise-driven (B2B audience), while content describing the latest gadgets will focus on consumer-specific attributes (B2C). Apart from this gross principle, take care of the following principles.
1. Not Curating Content Frequently
At the time of creating a piece of content, your sole focus can rest on the content itself, but you never know whether it’s going to make an impact on the audience or not. Sometimes even an informative piece of content can be boring if it doesn’t say anything new. This is why curating your content is so essential for engaging an audience and driving output.
By curating content you can gradually establish your leadership as the expert and develop your platform as the sought-after destination for credible knowledge. This can be achieved by curating content on social media channels and by curating content that can trigger further content. For the first, you can use tools like DrumUp and engage your audience and followers. For the latter, you can put the skyscraper technique in use for knowing content gaps that require further development of better content.
2. Not Relying on Social Advocacy
Content marketers often consider SEO as synonymous with content marketing without taking into consideration content promotion on social channels. Like SEO on the web, it’s the social advocacy that works for content marketing on social media platforms. Though the web delivers the vast majority of traffic for content marketers, an increasing number of audiences for websites is now generated through social channels.
Another major reason to give importance to social advocacy besides SEO is the increasing audience outreach and visibility of content. In addition to this, social advocacy and sharing of content also help in building social credibility for content. Let us mention some of the most effective ways to boost social advocacy for web content.
- Create content based upon the success stories or real-life stories of your customers. This helps engaging more people besides giving people reason to share the content.
- Create thought-provoking content that makes people engage with and share their opinion.
- Always try to create loyal brand advocates from your social audience by engaging with them in frequent discussions. Encourage people to share feedback and opinion.
3. Improper Keyword Optimization
Keywords and search terms require a rigorous focus for your audience to find your content easily. This obviously requires optimum keyword management. As Google is increasingly focusing on context-driven keywords and interpreting keywords semantically, it is up to the content marketers to take advantage of long-tail keywords to address the user search more specifically and contextually.
As Google is increasingly focusing on the quality of content, keyword stuffing and similar black-hat SEO tactics can make a negative impact on the content marketing output. Instead of placing keywords throughout the content it is always advisable to use them naturally and semantically in the content.
For staying ahead of your competition you need to beat your competitors in keyword strategy as well. Some of the most effective keyword research tools include Moz, SemRush, Ahref, etc. These tools by allowing you to get insights about the keyword strategy of your competitors will always help you to gain marketing leads.
To gain further insights go to the blogs of your competitors and watch out for the newly published content. Also, observe if there is any piece of content that is getting a lot of traction from people. By observing the content of your competitors you can easily have insights about the topics and keywords that are worth focusing on.
4. Not Having A Mixed Content Strategy
We all know that the mover and shaker of the web is the content. But if you equate content with only blog posts, you are altogether missing on the capabilities of a variety of content. It can rather be said that variety is what makes content king. Not just your business blog is enough to fulfill the content needs of the modern web. Some of the most commonly published types of content include the following.
- Blogs and articles
- Short-form videos
- Longer form videos
- White papers
- How-To Guides
- Infographics
- Case Studies
- Checklists
- Comments
- Webinars
- Memes
- GIFs
- Social media posts
- Podcasts
- Photographic images
- Animations
5. Not Having A Consistent Content Strategy
While great content will always take the marketing lead, without consistent publication of content you cannot move much further. Since the attention span of the modern web audience tends to be extremely smaller and short-lived, consistent and frequent publication will help you stay alive in the memory besides building credibility for your website or app.
This is why it is always advisable to publish content at regular intervals and have a solid strategy based on consistent content research, content creation and distribution pipeline. You can take the help of content scheduling tools to ensure regular publication while setting expectations for your regular audience.
6. Not Using Useful Tools
Last but not least of all mistakes is not using some effective tools that make the job of content creators and marketers easier. There are several helpful tools to take the load off your shoulder for tasks such as content publication, proofreading, doing on-page SEO, doing keyword research, integrated RSS feeds, content curation, etc.
Conclusion
Obviously, you may have a few other mistakes that we didn’t cover here. Well, here in this post we only tried to focus on the content marketing mistakes that can render bigger impacts than others. Every content marketer should take safeguard from these mistakes.
is the co-founder at CMARIX TechnoLabs Pvt. Ltd., a leading web and mobile app development company with 13+ years of experience. He loves to write about technology, startups, entrepreneurship and business. His creative abilities, academic track record and leadership skills made him one of the key industry influencers as well. Connect with him via LinkedIn and Twitter.
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