The importance of content marketing within inbound marketing strategies has grown exponentially over the past year. Your company content is your chance to tell your brand’s story, as well as gain the trust of your potential leads and customers. So it is imperative that you create quality, relevant content for your website, blog and marketing materials. Kuno has provided plenty of how-to’s, tips and useful information, so don’t forget those elements.
But it's also important to take another look at your content and make sure you are not committing some of the worst content crimes around. Read on to discover the seven content marketing mistakes you might be making.
- Talking about yourself too much: In the words of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, “Big mistake. Big. Huge.” People go on the web to be educated or entertained, not to read about you, you, you. Avoid peppering your content with your brand name and definitely avoid putting it in the title of your piece (unless it is an executive summary or something). Offer your readers some sort of quality takeaway and they will continue to come back to you for more.
- Boring your reader: If the reader is asleep by the second paragraph, they won’t be finishing your content, let alone converting to a lead or becoming a customer. Concentrate most of your efforts on your headline and lead; this is where you intrigue the reader and convince them to finish your content. If you are funny, that’s cool, go with that; but if you are not humorous, don’t try to be. There are other ways to entertain people: appeal to their emotions or ask an effective question, for example.
- Deciding not to copyedit: Your content doesn’t need to be perfect, but it needs to be professional. Your last line of defense before publication should be a copyeditor. Don’t ignore this step; obvious errors will make your content look amateurish and make you appear sloppy and incapable in the process.
- Faking it: While readers don’t want to have your sales pitch crammed down their throats, they do want to get to know you—and your content is your chance. Your content should be in your own authentic voice. This is how your site visitors will learn to trust you and ultimately decide whether or not they will become a customer. Show them who you really are (professionally); they will appreciate it.
- Not utilizing your resources: Get your employees to contribute to the company blog and other content. Each person has a different voice, expertise and point of view that will bring diversity and personality to the content. Also, allow your employees to post the content on their Facebook Timelines, Twitter streams and Google+ profiles. Getting your content out to a multitude of audiences helps it spread faster creating more traffic.
- Failing to solve a problem: Forget the fluff. Solve your customers’ problems. Ask yourself, or better yet, ask your customers what issues or challenges they face and use those as inspiration for creating and generating blogs, webpages and especially advanced content.
- Putting quantity above quality: We have often told you to publish frequently and consistently, that is true. But remember, quantity should never outdo quality. If you can only blog three times a week with relevant, helpful and entertaining content, that is OK. Don’t attempt to blog twice a day. If you can only produce one piece of advanced content worth reading every six months, that is OK, too. Don’t push it. When you start putting out junk, you start losing readers, leads and ultimately customers.
So take a look at your content. Make sure you are accomplishing all the to-do’s, but take another look to make sure you are not tooting your own horn a little too loudly, putting your readers to sleep or creating an alter ego. Remember to solve problems, create quality stories, utilize your employees and, for Pete’s sake, copyedit!
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