3 Most Common Content Marketing Mistakes And How To Avoid Them
One thing is established – Content marketing is effective. More than 90% of companies will be using content marketing this year. Are you one of them? After all, it’s a couple of 2000-word blog posts a month you need to make your content marketing kick off, right? Well, maybe not.
In reality, your posts are competing with some 60 million posts that get published every month.
Things can get frustrating when you see nobody reading or sharing the content you painstakingly wrote. Many business owners get discouraged and give up content marketing at a very early stage.
Many business owners think that it is a waste of time to write content that nobody cares about.
What most people don’t realise is, content is a sustainable solution and starts giving results over a period of time.
Here are the three most common mistakes about content marketing and how to avoid them.
Mistake 1: Creating Content Without Knowing Your Audience
Most content marketing efforts fail because the content is not relatable to its target audience. It happens because the content marketers don’t take the time to research what type of content their audience wants.
Irrelevant content will either bring you no leads or irrelevant leads—people who are not interested in your product. For example, writing a post about anything trending right now might get you traffic, but it will probably be irrelevant traffic unless the trend is related to your business niche.
Solution: Research Customer Interests
Researching customer interests is not as hard as it sounds. Tools like Buzz Sumo and Epic Beat make it easy to find out what’s trending with your audience. All you need to do is search for your keywords, and you can see a list of most popular content on that topic.
For example, when I search for the keyword “fast food” on Buzz Sumo I get the following picture.
And here are the Epictions from Epic Beat:
Can you notice that “healthy fast food” is a trending topic? If you’re working in the fast food niche, writing a few informative, actionable posts about healthy burger recipes might get you the attention of your audience.
Mistake 2: Not Using Multiple Formats Of Content
Everybody knows that text-only pages are boring. So, you make it a point to include at least one image on each page. It’s an SEO best practice as well to have one or two images on each page.
However, an image or two on a page is hardly enough to make your content shine. It’s a mistake to think images and text alone can get you the engagement you need.
The fact is that people love videos way more than images.
They view more than 100 million hours of video on Facebook every week.
Out of 500 businesses that Hub Spot surveyed this year, 85% had internal staff and resources to produce videos in-house.
People also love infographics.
High-quality infographics are 30 times more likely to be read than text articles. They are 3x more engaging on social media than any other form of content.
So, if you are you guilty of using only text and images as content?
Here’s what you should do instead.
Solution: Create Videos And Infographics
Animoto is a great website for producing professional slideshows and marketing videos. You can try it free, but removing the Animoto watermark will cost you a small fee.
Simply upload your photos and video clips and use one of the free or premium templates to create stunning videos on the fly. Magisto is another similar tool that you may use.
When you try these and a few other video editing tools, you’ll realize that creating awesome marketing videos is not out of your league. Just drag and drop the photos and video clips, add captions and music, and you’re done.
Use these tools to make how-to videos or to showcase your facilities and staff. You can sharply improve your ranking and conversion if you add professional looking videos to your sales pages. Video has become even more important after the rise of mobile video play.
As for the infographics, you can use Canva, Venngage, Visme, Infogr.am, or Picktochart to create impressive infographics, charts, and data visualizations. All of them are quite simple to use. You’ll be rolling out your first infographic within minutes if you have the concept ready.
So, move over text and images and make video and infographic the must-have elements on your site.
Mistake 3: Creating Only Viral Content
Wait, isn’t viral content supposed to be great for driving leads?
Actually, creating content only around viral topics is the third most common mistake content marketers commit.
Viral content drives you traffic for a few days and then you have to look for new topics. In order to be truly effective, the content you create today should still be driving you leads in 5 years.
Now, how do you create such content?
Solution: Create Evergreen Content
Alongside Buzz Sumo and Epic Beat, Google Trend is another great tool for researching trends. It tells you about the latest trends based on the keywords people are searching for. However, we’re not interested in researching the latest trends or fads.
We want to find solid trends that have been going strong for years.
Easy. Just enter a keyword and search for the trend. Then, increase the time to past 5 years or 10 years. Here’s trend for the term “content marketing agency” over the last 5 years.
It has been a trending search term for the last two years or so. Let’s compare it with the term “digital marketing agency”.
Wow. It’s hugely more popular. Maybe I should’ve written a post about digital marketing instead of content marketing. But you get the idea.
There’s another thing you can do to make sure your content is evergreen.
Once you have selected an evergreen topic, create exhaustive content on that topic. Leave nothing uncovered. The content should answer every question about the topic. Use video, infographics, images, and text to cover the topic from all angles.
Conclusion
Most business owners, when they start doing content marketing, commit one or more of these three mistakes.
- They don’t research what content their audience is interested in
- They use only text and images as content
- They create content only around viral topics
You can easily avoid these mistakes by using some free online tools.
- Use Buzz Sumo or Epic Beat to find out what topics are trending in your category
- Use Animoto, Megisto, Canva, Infogr.am, Visme, Picktochart or another free tool to create video and infographic content
- Create evergreen content after researching long-term trends in Google Trends
By avoiding these mistakes, can convert your content marketing efforts into leads and finally into sales.
If you are not sure how to set up a content marketing strategy for your business or how to get started with content, reach out to eMarket Experts and get a free consultation. Get in touch today!
