Content marketing is not new. The ideas have been around for decades. At this point, no business professional is unfamiliar with a blog, search engine traffic, or social media.
The problem, it seems to me, is that too many people have misunderstood the true purpose of content marketing — and so have missed the mark in their past efforts.
Go to most companies’ blogs, and you’ll often find fluffy, self-serving content: Pictures from their clean-up day at the local park, press release-style articles about promotions, and employee-of-the-month winners.
Or, it’s filled with content that feels derivative and identical to a thousand other articles on the internet.
It is no surprise to me that this kind of content has failed to bring in customers.
Here are FIVE CONTENT MARKETING MISTAKES:
1. Not Getting SALES Involved– The inbound approach is not just a marketing one. In fact, if you limit it to just marketing, you undercut your content marketing results. Inbound is as much about sales as it is about marketing.
If you don’t get your sales team involved with your content marketing, you’re more likely to produce a library of the wrong content. Marketers love to brag about reach, and what’s more encouraging than thousands of site visitors?
The sales team will bring your marketing team back down to earth. Because your sales reps hear from actual customers each day, they know the questions your prospects are asking.
2. Making Irrelevant Content– If you can’t draw a clear line between the content you create and one of your paid products, then your content marketing efforts will be wasted. Or, at a minimum, they won’t reach their potential.
When you’re creating content, every single piece of content needs to lead directly back to:
• Email opt-ins and free products.
• Industry thought leadership.
• Products and services.
• Lead generation.
3. Always Playing it Safe-Content marketing is about educating your customers, building trust, and being transparent so that your potential buyers can access the information they need to become customers.
You have to offer honesty instead of a sales pitch, which means you need to sometimes address thorny subjects and answer hard questions.
Hiding things like the prices or drawbacks of your product will make it impossible for customers to have total clarity before purchasing. Your target audience is asking these questions, so it’s productive to create content with the answers.
4. No Clear Leadership – If content marketing is something that gets tacked onto other responsibilities, it’s going to fall by the wayside. A dedicated content marketer needs to be leading the charge to create content that’s going to get results.
It’s unrealistic and unfair to ask someone who already has a full-time job to also produce and implement a full content marketing strategy. That in itself is a full-time job, and it’s a mistake to see it as an “add-on” to an existing role.
I know that people power is stretched thin, and there are some common ways to save time, such as publishing user-generated content, but all of the shortcuts in the world can’t compete with an actual content marketer.
5. No Content Framework – Without a plan, your content strategy probably isn’t going to get very far. A good content marketing framework gives you:
• Goals.
• Structure.
• Benchmarks.
Without it, you’ve got guesswork and inconsistency — which can quickly lead to frustration.
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