3 Common Content Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid
- Marketing
Zainab Abdul Rehman- 0
- 9 minutes read
Content is a marketer’s best friend. It’s the focal point that can make or break your campaigns; it sells, attracts, engages, and can be the deciding factor why your customer chooses to follow you. But as important as it is, content also requires careful planning and research to be successful in resonating with the audience.
This poses a challenge because, in this constantly growing digital space, content is at a surplus. Brands, individuals, corporates or magazines, everyone knows the importance of content for growth and thus, are hell-bent on creating and producing blogs, videos, posts etc. to grab the audience’s attention. This creates competition that is tough and leaves little room for mistakes. You have to get your content right to get the right results.
This pressure of producing the best makes mistakes more common, five of which are pretty common in all industries. Let’s take a look at those mistakes and find out how you can prevent them in order to succeed.Not creating relatable content
One very important rule in content creation is that whatever you’re creating – be it a design, a blog, video, podcast, or email campaign – your audience needs to be able to relate to what you’re communicating. Then only will they understand what you’re offering, you’ll also be able to pique their interest and encourage them to engage with you or your brand.
To make your content more relatable, you need to know who your audience is an create a profile that tells you your audience’s interests, dislikes, and every detail that can help you identify what your audience wants to read, watch, or listen to.
One way to find out these details about your audience is by using Facebook’s Audience Insight tool. Just add basic demographic details of your audience, add interest and other targeting details if you want, and explore the type of audience that matches your interest and demographic persona.
One advantage of using Facebook Audience Insights is that you get to add your page in the audience creation section to check the type of people who like or follow your page, their most common interest groups, and the pages most of them have liked.
This gives you insight into what type of pages and brands your audience is interested in, and you can create your strategy based on that research.
Another option to consider is the usage of technical jargon and words in your content. Whether it’s your website or your social media platforms, your content should be easy enough to understand, and well structured so that your audience doesn’t get bored or confused. Using big words, writing long paragraphs, or adding clutter in your design can discourage your audience from taking action as they’ll be too confused to understand the message behind said content.
Insufficient content across the funnel
To maintain a proper digital marketing funnel it’s important that your content is structured to fit each step of the funnel. But a lot of times, brands and content marketers miss the middle steps of the funnel and only create content for the top and end of the funnel, despite the fact that the middle of the funnel is probably crucial to push a customer from the consideration to confirmation stage.
Your content should either be expendable enough to cover the entire funnel, or you should have separate content pieces for each step of the funnel. Here are some content formats you can create for your brand:
- Top of the Funnel: Blog posts, podcasts, social media posts, vlogs, photographs, magazine ads or articles, landing pages, etc.
- Mid of the Funnel: Educational content like ebooks, newsletters, downloadable resources, quizzes, surveys, testimonials, etc.
- End of the Funnel: Demo sign-ups, customer stories, webinars, event content, etc.
Creating content that cannot be repurposed
Content is perishable – it has a particular shelf life, during which it makes all the impact it needs to, and then people move on. Only a few big content pieces make it through the test of time, but we’ll discuss that later.
The point is that because your content is most likely to be perishable, it’s important that you don’t put it to waste after its 15 minutes of fame have passed. Try to reuse your content as relevantly as possible, because chances are that the blog or podcast that was
popular among your audience in its initial stages may yet again prove to be useful if you use it in a different way.
For example, if you frequently update blogs on your website, a couple of months after it was published, the blog can be shortened and posted as a micro-blog piece on Instagram or LinkedIn.
Similarly, posts that were designed weeks back, but are still relevant, can be reused on your social media to promote your brand’s offerings.
Similarly, if you’re working on video content, try to create multiple videos out of one storyboard. This can especially help if you’re running video ads on YouTube or Facebook. Large video boards can be edited to fit multiple video formats like Bumper ads or Skippable video ads. This will not only improve your ad strategy, but will also increase brand awareness as different ad formats work differently, and thus, can give you room for trial and error in your advertisements.
Lack of user-generated content
User-generated content refers to stories, testimonials or posts that come from your customers directly. Be it a food video shot by a customer during their visit, or a testimonial on your Facebook page, user-generated content is gold. Why? Because people trust people. You as a brand may not be able to build trust as quickly as a person with a friend list of 100 people. A review from them will work as a booster within their social circle for your brand. But as important as such content is for brands, most of them miss out on the opportunity to flaunt their customer’s feedback. What can you do to avoid it? Here’s a list:
- Record a testimonial: You don’t need professional equipment to record a video testimonial. Just make sure your customer is willing, get your phone, and record a 30-second testimonial which can bring you thousands of worth of sales if you use it correctly.
- Get an autograph: Autographs don’t have to come from celebrities, your customers can give you autographs as well. Whether you’re a restaurant, an open office space, or a boutique, create a small space or board where your customers can write their experience, and then showcase those signatures or autographs on your digital platforms.
- Take pictures: Pictures tell stories that text may not be able to convey. Take photos of your customers enjoying their time at your store or restaurant, or create a shot of the crowd at your franchise. Seeing your restaurant crowded will raise anticipation in potential customers, who’ll then visit just to see what the hype is all about.
- Engage users in competitions: Don’t have a brick and mortar store? No problem. You can always host competitions on digital channels that engage customers to share photographs or stories with you. Involve an influencer in your quest or host the competition on your channel – but make sure you’re being fair to your users and offering them something valuable in return. This way they’ll always remember the experience, and you’ll get the user content you need to promote your brand – a win-win!
While these aren’t the only mistakes that one can make while handling content, they’re some of the most common ones. When working on content, make sure that you can optimize it fully to reap the most rewards from it across all channels. Once done, you can easily win over your customers for the best possible results.
