7 Things You Shouldn't Do With Your Content Marketing

Users upload over 2.3m blog posts every day on WordPress.

That’s 27 blog posts every second. It’s no wonder that creating a content marketing strategy that stands out is so challenging.

To get anywhere in content marketing, it’s not just about the quantity.

It’s about creating the right content and reaching the right people at the right time. That’s a lot to juggle, and it’s easy to make mistakes.

But you can avoid some of those mistakes if you just know what they are. And you’ll learn about the seven biggest mistakes in this article.

1. Neglect your reader profile

If you want to engage with your audience, you have to know who they are.

You might make excellent content that hits all the right notes and checks all the right boxes. But if your audience can’t relate to it, nobody’s going to read it.

More than half of users report getting access to push content that isn’t relevant to them.

Think about what that means:

You might be spending more than half of your marketing budget, reaching an audience that doesn’t care about what you’re marketing.

Before you create a strategy, you have to thoroughly create a customer profile and keep that profile in mind whenever you create content. Whenever you do, think about why that customer would want to read it.

2. Only make topical content

You’d be forgiven for making this mistake, as even some of the most prominent players in the industry fall prey to this.

And it’s only making content that’s relevant to the moment.

Sure, it’s essential to keep up with the times and address breaking technologies and developments in your field.

But that shouldn’t be all you do. You need to have a plan for evergreen content as well.

Otherwise, your content marketing strategy only drives traffic for a few days, and you have to keep making new content to keep up.

3. Perfunctory research about customers

If you want your customers to engage, you have to know what engages them.

This mistake relates to the first point. You need to know what your customers are interested in so you can make the content they want.

As an industry expert, you probably have some exciting things to share with customers.

But it’s not about what you find interesting. Use audience insights wherever you can find them (Facebook is a great place to start) to figure out what your audience wants and then create content accordingly.

4. Fail to keep track of content performance

In your hurry to get more relevant content out as soon as possible, you might be neglecting one of the most important things about it.

Content marketing needs to meet defined goals. If it’s not achieving those goals, you have to change your strategy.

Conversely, if a piece of content is performing like gangbusters, it can teach you a lot about what your audience wants.

Analyze traffic as often as you can, and adjust your content marketing efforts accordingly.

5. Have a weak vision or no vision at all

Without a clear vision, your content will either look scattered and aimless or, worse, fall flat.

It comes from focusing too hard on “what” you sell, and not enough on “why” you’re selling it.

A vision should provide structure and voice to all your content, in a broad sense.

Before you even start your content marketing campaign, you should clearly understand what your company’s vision is.

If you know why you do the things you do, it’s easier to convince people to buy into your vision, not just your product.

6. Fail to promote your content

Again, this is a consequence of misunderstanding the point of content marketing. If you think that content marketing is just about publishing content and forgetting about it, think again.

Making great content that sits in some backwater of the web does nothing for you.

It’s at least twice as hard to create new content than it is to promote content that already exists.

Some experts recommend an 80/20 approach:

80% of your effort should be geared towards promoting content and 20% in investing it. Now, that’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s a good starting point.

7. Use sparse CTAs or none at all

Here’s a scenario that perplexes many newcomers to content marketing:

They create a piece of content that performs great. It gets tons of hits, and people spend a lot of time on it. And still, it fails to drive traffic.

What’s going on?

Nine times out of ten, it’s a poor use of CTAs.

You have to know how to capitalize on people’s attention when you capture it. Don’t let the fear of over-selling scare you into paring down your CTAs to the point that you waste content.

It’s about content, but it’s also about marketing

Unfortunately, there’s no magic pill that’ll make you a content marketing genius overnight.

Like everyone else, you’ll have to make mistakes and learn from them. But you can make the process a little less painful by learning from the mistakes of others.

Look at your marketing practices; how many of these mistakes are you still making?