7 Content Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid
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As a content marketing consultant, I get a lot of questions from companies
that want to know what they do
wrong with their content marketing efforts.
After all, 70% of marketers lack a
consistent or integrated content strategy for a reason.
After working with many companies, I have found there are a series of
mistakes they always make.
In this
article, I would like to show you the 5 most common mistakes companies do with their
content marketing efforts, and
how you can avoid them.
Mistake #1: Not Creating Customer
Personas
Before you even being with your content
marketing, you need to know who you are
talking to. You can't just create content for the sake of it and write about something you want to. Any piece of
content you create has to have a target audience, that is,
a group of people that share a
few commonalities.
This target audience is best structured by using a marketing technique called "customer personas". This technique consists in creating fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. With these personas, you can discover what problems and needs your audience has, which makes content creation much easier and more effective.
For example, if
you sell sales SaaS software, your audience is salesmen. But inside this broad target audience, there
are different segments that differ from each
other. By creating personas, you can separate sales managers from sales executives, junior salesmen from
experienced salesmen, salesmen that work in the tech industry
from the ones that work in the
finance industry, and so on.
By segmenting
your audience with your customer personas, you can see not everybody has the same problems and needs.
Using the previous example, you can
discover that sales managers may not have enough time to manage their team, whereas
junior salesmen may don't know how to deal with rejection.
With these different
personas, you can create more targeted,
effective, and engaging
content for your audience.
In order to create those customer personas, you need to start researching both your current customers, and the ones that will benefit the
most from your solution, whether it's SaaS software, apps, or services.
Mistake #2: Not Using A Reader-Friendly Structure
It's a fact: people don't read online, they scan.
In 2013, analytics vendor Chartbeat analyzed
Slate and other websites
and found that most visitors scroll
through about only 50-60% of an
article page. In another
study, Jakob Nielsen’s eye-tracking study from 2008 indicated that less than 20% of the text
content is actually read on an
average web page.
I know this sounds awful and makes you want to give up on your content marketing efforts. But don't panic, there's
a solution: create content
optimize for the web.
You don't have to use complicated software to do so, you only need to follow certain rules of thumb that will help your readers scan as much as they want while absorbing the content you offer.
The main elements of a reader-friendly content structure you should use on your content
are:
·
Headings, from H1 to H6 (this is HTML code).
·
Magnetic headlines and sub-headlines.
·
Short paragraphs, no longer than 5 or 6 sentences.
·
Bullet points.
·
Images.
·
Bold and italics.
The
job of all these elements is one: to make
it easy for people to consume your content.
If you can do that, your content will get the attention it deserves, and therefore, the results you want.
Mistake #3: Pushing People to a Signup (Paid or Free)
Content
marketing isn't the same as selling. Like any other type of marketing, the goal of content marketing
is to attract, persuade, and convert
your readers to do what you
want them to do, one step at a time. The ultimate goal is a sale, but that's not the first thing you should have in mind.
A customer journey
from not being aware your company exists to being a customer
goes something like this:
1. First, you attract a
customer with a headline that makes them want to know more about your
content.
2.
Then, they scan (and
hopefully, read) your content.
3.
If they like your content because of its usefulness, they share it with their friends.
4. Once they become familiar
with your content,
they subscribe to your newsletter, because they want to keep
reading about your content (they don't care about what you offer yet).
5.
After they sign up, you keep sending them useful
content to their inbox, while also sending them more "focused" content (i.e. content
with a clearer intention of
purchase).
6. They realize you can help them with their problems, so they start researching about your company's offerings.
7.
They sign up for your paid services.
This is a long journey, and that's how it's meant to be. It can be more complicated or simpler than this, depending
on your industry and your company's offer. Either way, you can't expect to push people to become customers
of yours right away.
It will take time, but as it goes with life, if you put one step at a time (and don't
make the mistakes laid out in this article), you will get people to pay for your products and services.
Mistake #4: Creating
Generic Content
In the third step of the previous mistake, I said once people visit your
blogs to consume your content, they may share it if
they find that your content is
useful.
The importance of the usefulness of your content
can't be minimized. You can't expect
people to care about what you have to say if what they find is content that doesn't make their lives better in any
way. You first have to give value to receive
something back (whether that is a social share, email signup, or a sale).
The only way to "give value" to your customers
is through high-quality content.
If you follow
the advice given in the three previous sections, your content will already be high-quality. That is, if you
know who you are creating the content for,
if you make it easy to read and scan, and don't push the readers into doing something they don't want to do, your
content will likely stand out from the rest.
However, that's not enough.
You need to know how to find, organize, and present
useful information in a way your customers will enjoy consuming. In order to do so, follow the next steps:
1. Find a topic for your
content, which should solve a problem or tap a need for your target
audience (remember the first mistake).
2.
Define what specific topic you are going to talk about.
3.
Find a unique angle for your content. The best way to
do so is by doing some competitor analysis. Look for something that no
one talks about, but should.
That's your angle.
4. Choose the type of content
you are going to use, whether it's an article, an ebook, a white
paper, a webinar,
etc. For the sake of this example,
let's say you picked an article.
5. Start researching the topic. Find data to back up your angle.
6. Develop an outline, which should lay out
the structure of the article.
7. Start developing the
content. Don't leave anything behind, just write until you don't have anything else to say. Content length should be
at least 1000 words, although 2000-3000
word articles tend to get better results.
8. Edit the
article. Trim the parts that are unnecessary, and embellish the ones that
need a retouch.
9.
Publish the article,
and promote it through
social media,
influencer
outreach, and email marketing.
That's a quick overall list of tasks you need to implement to create
high-quality content for your company's
blog. Similar to what I mentioned with the previous mistake, the content creation
process is complex and takes time. Take your time,
follow the steps, and focus
on giving value to your customers.
Mistake #5: Not Adding Images
and Graphics
There's nothing sadder than reading an article that doesn't feature at
least one image. It's not for aesthetic reasons, but for pedagogical ones.
You see, people learn in different ways. There
are around 71 models that try to explain
how people learn anything, theories as complex and theoretical as you can imagine. But from all these theories, there's one that I like to refer to: The Neil Fleming's VAK/VARK model.
This model
separates the different ways people learn in four different ways:
1.
Visual learning.
2. Auditory learning.
3. Read/write learning.
4. Kinesthetic learning.
As you can see,
one of these types of learnings is visual, while another one is "read/write". If you use only the latter, you are
leaving many people behind.
(You could also add an audio version of your articles, like Jon Loomer, does. But I can imagine that's
not so easy to implement.)
In other words, you can't develop content without using images. That's why you need to add as many relevant images as you can to your content. This also includes graphics and even videos.
According to a study done by one of the greatest copywriters of all time,
David Ogilvy, there are four things
you need to know when using images and graphics for your content:
1. The placement of the image matters. When an image is placed above a headline, the latter ends up being
read by 10% more people than when it's placed below an image. This
means you should put your images above your headlines to increase the
readership.
2. Never break the left margin with your images. People from the western hemisphere like to leave the left margin as an anchor, which helps us have a consistent reading experience. Otherwise, our eye path is interrupted, making it harder to concentrate on the text at hand. Because of this, you should always place your images on the right margin of the page.
3. Always use relevant
images. This goes without
saying, but using
images that aren't directly related to the text's content makes the
reading experience harder. Don't add
images for the sake of them, they should always serve a
purpose.
4.
Captions
are read four times more than the body copy. Captions under images are read on average 3x more
than the body copy. As a consequence, you should always add a caption to every image.
It goes without saying that using images
for the sake of it if it's not necessary nor useful. If you see this article, you will see I didn't use that many
images, not because I didn't want,
rather because I didn't want to annoy you, nor do I have a reason to use one. You
should do the same with your
content.
Closing Thoughts
As a content marketing consultant, I understand implementing content marketing
the right way isn't easy for many companies. You will make mistakes, and that's
fine.
But if you follow
the tips and steps that were shown
to you in this article,
you will be a step ahead of
your competitors. Not only that, but you will be doing a favor to your customers. And by doing so, you will have a much
easier time getting leads,
acquiring more customers, and increasing your profits.
What mistakes that I mentioned in this article have you ever done?
Share your experiences in the
comments below!
Comments (1)
Asteria G.
2
HAIR EXTENSION SUPPLIER
Can't agree more! I may scan your article, like only 40%, only the headers, numbers, opening and ends.