In a content strategy, content takes precedence over all the other aspects. There is an important reason for it. Impeccable content enables a brand to effectively communicate its message to its business prospects in a million different ways. Most potential customers rely on content to know the details of a company’s business offerings and perceive a brand’s market authority. No business can really go very far without a killer content marketing strategy.
An effective content strategy helps content marketers work on defined goals and be on course. It also helps businesses expand their markets and target audiences by leaps and bounds. A well-defined content marketing strategy ensures that a company consistently plans and achieves its marketing goals. However, if your content strategy is off, then it doesn’t matter how fast you are going because you are in the wrong direction.
Do you wish to promote your brand with an effective content strategy? If yes, then take a look at these nine most common content strategy mistakes that kill results and that you must avoid always.
1. Not Establishing A SMART Goal For Your Content Strategy
You may pen down the blueprint for an effective content marketing strategy. But you wouldn’t be able to attain your goals as long as you do not execute them to perfection. Some marketing professionals focus on achieving several short-term goals on an ad-hoc basis. They go haywire and fail to achieve their primary objective in the process. This is one of the most fundamental yet common content strategy mistakes you must avoid.
Setting up a S.M.A.R.T. goal for your content strategy can help you prevent this situation. A S.M.A.R.T Goal stands for a Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, and Time-Based Goal. Such a goal can help you achieve your primary goal, consistently bring in results, and plan future strategies without any hassle.
2. Perceiving Textual Content As The Only Form Of Content For Content Marketing Strategy
Blogs help you share information about your brand in detail. Hence it is a brilliant content marketing strategy. However, content marketers make the mistake of perceiving them as one of the primary or only forms of content.
On the flip side, there are other engaging variants of content that can appeal to a brand’s target audience. These include animations, images, podcasts, carousals, GIFs, memes, infographics, videos, etc.
As much as a content strategy should be about texts, it is also about images, audio and videos. Treating textual content as the ultimate form of content can prevent you from investing in other forms of effective content that can amplify results and maximize your profitability. So remember, the textual content is a great content strategy but not the only one out there.
3. Using Long Paragraphs In Articles And Blogs
Nine out of ten readers prefer to read content that is crisp and concise content. They appreciate it when facts are available with subheadings and bullet points. Long paragraphs with lengthy sentences can put off readers in just a few seconds. In such cases, they switch over to another alternative blog or article for the same piece of information they need presented more simply and more precisely. This can kill results for the content marketing campaign of a brand.
4. Creating Content That Does Not Resonate With Your Target Audience
Unless you create relevant content that caters to the needs, desires or problems of your target audience, you won’t get what you want.
Some brands only create specific content that just talks about their products or services. Business prospects may not find it useful for two reasons.
The first reason is that creating content specific to products and services always can be perceived as promotionally pushy and putting off. This kind of content may lead your potential customers to believe that you are desperate to sell instead of ensuring your market authority and brand credibility.
The second reason that such content falls flat on its face is that it fails to educate your target audience adequately and lead them to make a purchase decision.
A piece of content that does not address the demands of business prospects may not produce anticipated outcomes. Running a content marketing campaign that does not resonate with your audience is a classic case of marketing failure.
5. Not Having A Strategy To Promote Or Distribute Content
While content creation is the significant step of your content strategy, it truly is just the first step. There is no point in creating content if nobody consumes it. Hence, you need a content delivery, promotion and distribution strategy in place. Without an effective content promotion and distribution strategy aligned with your business requirements in place, achieving targeted outcomes is next to impossible.
6. Putting Emphasis Solely On SEO In Content Strategy
Search engine optimization (SEO) continues to be relevant and significant to content marketing strategies at present. However, solely relying on it can make things complicated for a brands to attain their marketing goals. Almost all brands use it these days, and such is the competition. It would help if you looked beyond it to maximize the chances of success. Some other content strategies include Instagram Marketing, Facebook Marketing, Email Marketing etc.
7. Creating Low-Quality Content
Content is key to an effective content strategy and a successful content marketing strategy. Creating low-quality content is not just careless. It is one of the most detrimental content strategy mistakes that can ruin your brand’s credibility.
Many business owners make the mistake of hiring content creators for dirt cheap prices to save cost and maximize profits. In reality, what they are doing is putting off their potential customers, ensuring their potential customers notice their competitor’s better quality content (because that’s how Google makes you organic suggestions), maximizing their losses and wondering what went wrong.
Some examples of low-quality content attributes include heavy grammatical errors, low readability, high keyword stuffing, plagiarism, irrelevance and factual ambiguity.
8. Lack Of Focused Content Strategy
Beyond any doubt, content marketing is an ocean of prolific possibilities. Some content marketers attempt to do it all. Some succeed wonderfully and reap benefits unknown and mind you, this is exceptionally rare. Most marketers fail because there is so much to do even before execution.
They fail in their content marketing efforts not because they lack the knowledge but because they lack the focus. Making a prudent content strategy and a content marketing strategy and its successful execution requires focus.
You must pick three or four marketing strategies based on your marketing objectives. You must only focus on these three to four content strategies and content marketing strategies for three to six months time before making any conclusions or changes. Focusing on too many things at the same time is overwhelming in all circumstances. Only a focused approach can help you understand what works best for your brand.
9. No Outlining Whatsoever
Most content writers feel that the more content they write, the better it is. However, this cannot be far from the truth. They undermine the importance of structuring or outlining their content based on their content strategy, the chosen content delivery platform algorithm, and expected content consumers. Outlining your content gives both the content creator and the content consumer the requisite clarity.
Some easy ways of avoiding this content strategy mistake are as follows.
- Predeciding the objective of your content piece
- Dividing content into bite size segments for easy consumption and high retention
- Using Crisp and Concise Headings and Sub Headings
- Using bullets for high readability and easy understanding
A good content strategist must know that crafting unstructured content is one of the most fundamental content strategy mistakes.
If you want to avoid making content strategy mistakes that will do more harm than good, you can contact us , and our team will help you build a content marketing strategy that will get you the results your business needs to skyrocket your revenue and maximize your profits.
No comment yet, add your voice below!