It is undeniable that content marketing is an effective way to drive website traffic. Plus, this tactic complements a lot of digital marketing strategies.
Why Content Matters For Digital Marketing
Without content, it can be challenging to incorporate your target keywords. Thus, it reduces your website’s chance to rank for relevant search terms.
Moreover, you are less likely to build links without content. Keep in mind that people link to resonating and informative content. If you do not have it, you cannot convince anyone to link to you.
Lastly, everything you share on social media is content. Without content, what are you going to share on social platforms?
Despite that, many are still committing these common content marketing mistakes:
1. Lack of Audience Research
The reason you do content marketing is that you want to attract your audience’s attention. However, showcasing your vast vocabulary is now enough.
It is imperative to research and understand what your audience wants from you.
The simplest way to do this is to look at your competitors’ most popular content. Look into them and see what makes these content popular.
Is it because of the tone? Or is it because the content is full of useful information?
It will also help if you look into the gaps. What do these content miss? And then use your findings as a basis of how you should produce your content.
Another way to do this is to use Facebook Audience Insights. What this tool does is collect useful information from Facebook users. This includes their age group, location, gender, and interests.
These data could come in handy when crafting content for your audience. Plus, it ensures that your content is something that will resonate with them.
2. Not Determining Your Content Goal
There is a purpose for every content we make. This post you are reading is meant to educate you on the common content marketing mistakes.
Meanwhile, there is content that is meant to drive sales, and there are those for brand awareness.
If you want to ensure that your content is aligned with your goals, you can use the buyer’s journey as your guide. According to HubSpot, a customer undergoes three stages:
- Awareness: This is when a customer realizes that he has a problem.
- Consideration: This is where the customer is looking for solutions and exploring his options.
- Decision: This is when a customer picks a product or service provider to help solve his dilemma.
With the buyer’s journey in mind, you will know which content to produce, depending on your goals.
After all, someone who is reading this post is more likely to say, “Ah! They know a lot about content marketing. Perhaps, I should contact them to know if they offer content marketing packages that I can use.”
3. Not Repurposing Your Content
Humans process images 60,000 times faster than plain text. This explains why some people find it boring to read a book and why videos and images generate thousands of social media engagement.
Despite that, many content producers think that having a blog is enough. What they do not know that they can maximize the value of their content repurposing.
What does content repurposing mean? It is transforming or expanding your top-performing content.
For instance, you created a blog post about popular plastic surgery procedures worldwide. Instead of letting it brew in your blog post archive, you can give it a new life as an infographic.
Mind you; there are companies that provide various content marketing services, which include infographic design.
The idea of content repurposing is more than just breathing new life to your top-performing content. It also expands your link-building opportunities, as some websites prefer to link to visual content rather than blog posts.
4. Not Creating Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is content that stays relevant throughout the years. This is different from timely or viral content, as the latter only drives engagement within days.
Meanwhile, evergreen content can still drive traffic, leads, and backlinks after five years. It is imperative to publish evergreen content on your website.
So, how can you publish evergreen content? The answer is in Google Trends.
Plugin your target keyword, and see how its popularity grows through the years.
Google Trends has data since 2004. Hence, you can see whether a search term has a spike from time to time or if it keeps on increasing.
You want to see the latter, as it indicates that your target keyword is evergreen content.
5. Missing Call-To-Action
So, your audience can consume your excellent content. Now what?
You may have published a lot of blog posts. You turned some of them into videos, social media posts, and infographics. And yet, you were unable to generate conversions from these.
That does not mean that your content is ineffective. It is possible that you forgot to add a compelling call to action.
Your CTA can be as simple as “Leave a comment below!” You can also opt for something fancy like a fancy banner at the bottom of your post.
Nonetheless, it would help if you keep the following in mind:
- Your CTA should stand out from the rest of your content
- Your CTA should drive your desired action
- Your CTA should be concise and straightforward
Doing so ensures that your CTA will do its job and bring the conversions you aim for.
Conclusion
If you want to keep driving quality traffic and leads to your website, content marketing is vital.
Doing so enables you to incorporate keywords you want to rank for. It also helps you generate backlinks, which can complement your SEO efforts.
But for your content marketing campaign to be effective, you must avoid the following mistakes:
- Not researching about your audience
- Not determining your content goal
- Not repurposing your content
- Not creating evergreen content
- Not adding a call-to-action on your content
If not, you may miss out on many opportunities. This includes creating a community around your brand and improving your business’s revenue.
