3 Common Content Marketing Mistakes and How To Avoid Them
Content marketing is one of the most effective and affordable ways to get the attention of potential clients and customers. But there’s a catch… Your content has to be well written and created with the customer in mind. Anything else could have the exact opposite effect, and end up driving your clients and customers straight to the waiting websites of your competitors.
Here are three common mistakes many content marketers make and how you can avoid them.
Mistake #1 – Stale Content
When you start a new website, it’s common to load it up with ten or twenty articles right at the beginning, and then leave it alone for awhile. While it’s a great idea in theory, and makes it look to your visitors like you have lots to share and know what you are talking about, it’s really not that great if you don’t come back and add new content on a regular basis.
And it’s not just the customers who will notice. Freshness of content is an important factor in where your site ranks on the search engines. It may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but you get more ranking points for how new your content is, rather than how old it is.
Fix #1 – Regular Updates
To avoid having stale content, what you need to do is develop a posting schedule. It doesn’t matter if you post once a day or once a week (but at least once a day is best), as long as you are consistent. If the search robots visit your site and there’s nothing new for them to see, then they will take longer to come back and when you do post new content it will take longer to get indexed.
You can still write your posts and articles in batches (I do mine six at a time), and pre-post them so that they will show up on your blog on the date and time that you specify.
Mistake #2 – It’s All About You
Another very common mistake is to make your content all about you, your products, and your services. Your customer doesn’t really care about you. I realize that may sound harsh, but it’s true. They don’t care about you, only what you and your products/services are going to do for them. If you only write from your perspective you will not engage your customers. If you do manage to capture their attention, you won’t hold it more than a minute or two at most.
Fix #2 – Make It All About Your Customers
It may take a little practice, but learning how to write with your customer in mind is well worth the effort. When you can tap in to your audience’s wants and needs, then you can create content that makes it all about them and not about you.
Mistake #3 – Using Content as a Sales Pitch
The third mistake we’ll talk about here is another one that could have you rushing to rewrite your content — using your content to hard sell your visitors. There are several different types of content that you will use in the course of marketing to your visitors, and contrary to what you may think the actual sales pitch plays a very small part. If your content is nothing but a sales pitch, you will turn your visitors off. People want to be educated and informed, not sold to (even when they land on your site looking to buy).
Fix #3 – Use Content to Educate and Inform
Even when they are ready to whip out their credit card and buy, most people use the Internet to research their choices first. Use your content to educate and inform your customers about how your products and services could solve their problems. Answer their questions, overcome their objections, and allow them to get to know you. You’ll find that if you let your visitors get to know, like, and trust you they will buy without you having to worry about the hard sales pitch.
When it comes right down to it, content marketing can make or break your business. When you create fresh, well-written content that puts your customers’ wants and needs above everything else, you will find that not only will your online reputation improve, your sales and profits will too.
