What is your biggest fear of the rainy season? Let me guess – You’re unsure of potholes and small pits. You never know when you will put your foot in a puddle of water. The harmless-looking puddle becomes your dreaded enemy.
When you begin to doubt yourself, you become more cautious. Once you have made a mistake and fallen into a trap, you go more slowly, look around carefully, and proceed one step at a time.
If you make content marketing mistakes, it can be very embarrassing. However, you should not give up because of this. Instead, you should learn from your mistakes and be careful not to repeat them.
We asked marketing experts about the worst mistakes they’ve made with content marketing. They responded with their experiences, some of which have become life lessons for them.
Let us now dive right into it then:
MISTAKE #1. Not Knowing Your Audience
The most costly mistake you can make is not knowing your audience’s profile, including their demographics and aspirations. Having this information enables you to make the most of your content and get better results overall.
Polly Kay, Marketing Manager, English Blinds
Polly Kay, Marketing Manager at English Blinds, tried to appeal to a younger, more aspirational crowd during a marketing campaign, but ended up damaging the company’s brand image. The issue arose when Kay tried to market the company’s USP of “affordable luxury.” The company’s actual buyers, however, are older and richer, and were seeking luxury, not a bargain. As a result, Kay ended up alienating a large portion of English Blind’s existing customer base.
I realized that something was wrong with the campaign when it didn’t result in any significant revenue. In addition, we gradually started losing mailing list subscribers and repeat customers. If you don’t have a detailed understanding of your potential customer base and buyer demographics, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to expand your target audience. You could even end up losing the audience you already have.
Mistake #2. Not Knowing Your Goals
This text is saying that it is important to know your goals and objectives before you begin creating content. This is because if you do not know your goals, then the content you create may not be effective.
Roman-Zhyvitski, SEO Expert
Roman Zhyvitski, a SEO expert, says that when he first started his website, he attracted a lot of traffic but people were only visiting to get information and not to plan a trip. He fixed his mistake by writing new blogs but keeping the old ones too. The existing popularity of his website helped him rank well for more competitive keywords faster. When thinking about what the main goal of a website should be, profit should not be the only thing considered. There are other things to take into account such as product or service, affiliate links, ads, sponsored posts, etc. Traffic is not the goal but just one of the metrics of a website.
Mistake #3. Not Writing for Your Audience
Make sure you are always creating content for your audience. If you do not do this, your audience will soon stop supporting you. It is important to know what your audience wants, what their problems are, and what they need to do to fix them. Talk to them or use surveys to find out this information. However, if you do not have this information when you make content, it will not be successful.
You must decide what you want to create and what your audience wants to know.
“Your readers won’t care about your content if it’s not something they’re interested in,” says Lauren Mcmanus, co-founder of CreateandGo.
Tonya Davis, Marketing Manager, ThoughtLab
If you don’t, someone else will.” Tonya Davis from ThoughtLab explains that if someone is looking to unclog their drain themselves, they are likely looking for DIY posts on how to fix a clogged drain. If you don’t provide this content, someone else will.
Brett Downes from HQSEO stated that not writing for their target audience was a significant mistake that they made in the early days of their content marketing. He said that they published good quality content on a weekly basis across a diverse range of topics. The content was too technical and included a lot of SEO jargon which was not appropriate for their target market of business owners.
We identified that we were getting the wrong type of traffic and that this was impacting our conversions and leads which in turn decreased our sales. We looked into it further and saw that the majority of our traffic was coming from other SEO companies or digital freelancers. Our average visitor was a man under 30 years old, but our target audience is business owners, i.e., men and women above 35 years.
We made our content simpler so that our target market would understand it. We learned that explaining our business clearly would help us attract and convert the people we want as our audience.
Mistake #4. Quality Over Quantity
When it comes to content marketing, the most important thing is to have high quality content, rather than a large quantity of content. If you try to produce too much content, it could result in keyword cannibalization.
James Watkins, Digital Marketing Manager, PHS Group
James Watkins, Digital Marketing Manager at PHS Group, clarified that they had an action-packed content calendar for the whole year, with a minimum of two posts per week. They wanted to cover all the keywords they were ranking for, as well as the ones they were targeting.
However, this resulted in many blogs having similar content to each other and overlapping content. Keyword cannibalization caused the articles on the same website to compete against each other, rather than other websites. This translated to less traffic and fewer customers.
We realized that we needed to be more strategic in our approach and consolidate articles that were covering similar topics and keywords. This allowed us to create stronger, more comprehensive pieces of content. We also learned that it is more important to be flexible and adaptable than to rigidly stick to a plan that isn’t working.
Mistake #5. Not Repurposing Content To Increase Reach
Instead of a long article, try changing it into a short slideshow. This will help you reach more people and communicate complex information to them more effectively.
This is an example of content that has been reused, and it’s an effective content marketing strategy. However, only a small minority of content marketers regularly recycle their content.
If you keep writing about the same topics, you may have a hard time coming up with new material.
The pressure to meet a certain quantity when choosing topics may result in topics that are unrelated. Furthermore, not having enough time to focus on the content may result in subpar work.
Repurposing is a great way to avoid these problems.
Here are a few tips you can follow, when repurposing content:
- Take the sub-topics you’ve covered in your most popular webinar and do a deep-dive video tutorial of each sub-topic.
- Develop your most-read blog posts into exhaustive pillar posts. You can also take your blog post and record it in the form of a podcast.
- Use your company’s experiences to develop a case study for new hires or B2B customers. You can even send your “learnings from experience” in the form of a newsletter.
- Take your videos and podcasts and convert them into infographics.
- Compile all your expert interviews and make them into either a specialized eBook or an audio series.
- Take chunks of your PPT presentations and make them into graphs, tables, and infographics.
- Collate the photos from your blog and create a beautiful Pinterest board.
- Use the answer you’ve written to a Quora question to create a deeply-researched article.
- Break down your facts/figures-filled article and post each fact/figure as a separate social media post.
When you want to use content again, you can find tools like Piktochart and Blurb to help you.
Piktochart can help you create visuals from your text-heavy content, and Blurb can help you turn your visuals or brief content into longer reads like eBooks or whitepapers.
Mistake #6. Posting Content That Is Insensitive To The Audience
Content is effective when it is relatable and strikes the right chord with the reader. For example, a social media post that is relatable and captures the feeling of alienation that many customers feel can create a sense of community and bring those customers closer to the brand.
Sometimes brands don’t realize how inappropriate their content strategy can be. For example, Malaysian Airlines right after the twin flight crashes in 2014.
Malaysian Airlines ran a “
Bucket List” content campaign on their blog and social media pages.
The text is asking readers to send in a list of places they would like to visit in exchange for a free prize. The prize is promotion of their aircraft as the best way to travel to these places.
The term “Bucket List” refers to a list of things a person wants to do before they die.
Many customers were dissatisfied with Malaysian Airlines’ campaign that ran just a few months after their two planes crashed, resulting in hundreds of deaths.
Because of this, the company no longer had many customers.
Such insensitivity can ruin generations of patronage. But, there is something you can do to ensure that you never create such a mess in the first place:
- Be mindful of your audiences’ lived realities and the ongoing socio-economic-political events when creating a blog content strategy. Keep up with current affairs and check with off-shore employees before creating content for their country.
- Do hashtag research when selecting topics and keywords. These hashtags will tell you what the public is talking about online and what type of content you need to create.
- Implement social listening tools to understand the public’s sentiments about specific events.
Mistake #7. Not Investing In Content SEO
Many brands make poor choices when it comes to SEO, which can negatively affect their reach, ranking, and engagement.
Search engines can even lower your ranking, push you out of the first few pages because of such mistakes, and penalize if you are using any black hat practices.
Making bad SEO decisions can result in losing customers and site traffic.
Recovering from this can take years.
You can reinvent your SEO practices. Here are a few steps you can take:
- Use search engine-friendly URLs to increase the user experience
- Create content that addresses the search intent of specific users – separate landing pages for each target market will help
- Conduct a detailed on-site search to understand site usage behaviors
- Use the Google Search Console to get topics and keyword ideas
- Make sure you are present on a knowledge base or Google My Business. They’ll help strengthen your digital presence
- Bring down page load time to 2 seconds, or risk losing visitors
- Keep a minimum of 5 links to high DA sites. But avoid overseas links where possible. Search engines often don’t trust cross-country links, unless the link comes from a reputable source
- Follow the social media pages of marketing agencies and learn tips and tricks on how to optimize your websites
Mistake #8. Not Promoting Published Content Enough
Even if you create great-quality, SEO-optimized content, you might not get noticed by customers unless you use other techniques as well.
An influencer can help amplify your campaign message and reach a larger audience.
Here’s what you can do when you’re planning to implement an influencer campaign:
- Partner with influencers in the 10k-100k follower range. They’re neither too big nor too small and can benefit a large enough audience and focused marketing
- Don’t limit yourself to local influencers. For example, an overseas influencer might have a large follower base in your country of residence
- Make sure the influencer is culturally aligned with you and matches your brand values. Then, read through their older posts and collaborations and see if they can help you promote your existing or upcoming content
- Create reusable and share-worthy content and simple tools like these website templates for service/product proposals and share with influencers to leverage their reach effectively
- Use an influencer marketing automation tool like Hypr or Juvlon to conduct deep-dive performance analytics of the influencers you’re considering working with. You can use these tools to set up contracts, share project specifications, track audience engagement, and make payments to your influencer-partner
In addition to influencer marketing, other options for promoting content include social media marketing and PPC.
Wrapping Up
Avoiding the mistakes listed above will help your campaigns and brand get the most benefit from your efforts.
This will also prevent you from accidentally harming or reducing the brand value you have worked so hard to develop.
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