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5 Common Content Marketing Mistakes & How to Avoid Them

We all make mistakes and it’s not bad at all, in fact our mistakes are the main source of our learning! But, it’s certainly too bad not to learn from those mistakes.

If you are devising a content marketing strategy for your startup or small business, there are chances of making mistakes. Depending on your business model and the target audience, there can be variety of mistakes, but knowing the common mistakes and their solution can help you avoid most of them.

content marketing mistakes

This article will discuss five most common content marketing mistakes and their solutions. Here it goes:

1- Single Content Type:

If blogging is going to be your focus, it might seem logical to publish only blog posts, but this is actually a mistake. Publishing blog posts only will surely limit your reach.

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Solution: Make sure to include different content types whereby you can reach a broader audience using different mediums and even different methods on same medium. Include rich media, i.e. GIFs, infographics, images with stats, short videos and more.

include various content types

2- Not Using Content Personas:

Some marketers may argue that they already know their audience well, then why to waste time in unnecessary documentation! Well, it’s an essential for any business to publish content that the audience actually needs and not the one that they think their audience will be interested in.

Content Marketing Institute has rightly quoted that, “Without personas, you may only be guessing what content your audience wants, which means you are more likely to revert to creating content around what you know best (your products and company) instead of around the information your audience is actively seeking.”

Solution: Start with picturing your ideal customer, consider the buying cycle and create the content personas based on following content preferences and consumption patterns:

  • How they prefer to access information?
  • Which content formats engage them more?
  • What device they use to access content online, i.e. mobile, tablet, desktop.
  • What time they are more active and which social platform they use most?
  • How much information they want to receive?
  • Who/what influences their content consumption?
buyer personas

3- Not Considering Keywords:

So you think your business model is not dependent on SEO, so why wasting time on keywords and all that optimization. Wait, you must know that keywords are the foundation of almost all online marketing strategies and you cannot devise a workable content marketing strategy without well researched keywords.

Solution: Spend some time with authentic tools like Google Keyword Planner, Wordstream and a few more to filter out what your audience is looking for more!

keywords in content marketing

4- Stagnant Content:

All your efforts to create highest quality content may go worthless, if it remains on your own blog/website and doesn’t travel. Great content without promotion is of zero value.

Solution: List all the social platforms and other mediums, i.e. email newsletter, sponsoring others newsletters, guest blogging etc and plan how to share content on each platform for maximum outreach.

content promotion

5- Over-Selling:

Stuffing your content with too much of sales pitch is one big mistake! You must know that content marketing hardly ever generates direct sales. Stuffing sales messages in your content will do nothing other than pushing your customers away from the sales process.

Solution: Include content that brings your customers and prospects closer to you. Make them listen to you by providing them with helpful content. Once they are sure that you create them some value, sales will come automatically!

no selling

I hope, dealing the above five issues efficiently, you can develop a great content marketing strategy that builds a strong brand!

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