Making mistakes isn’t a bad thing, as long as you’re learning from them.
But too many tech brands aren’t learning, particularly when it comes to content strategy. And alas, they run the risk of being left in the dust.
Content marketing absolutely works to bring in new leads and drive sales, but it demands some attention and TLC.
With 70% of B2B marketers planning to increase their content output in 2017 compared to 2016, there’s some decent competition.
That means that you’ll have to pick up the pace with your content implementation as well, if you want your market presence to stay competitive.
Content...drives leads and sales, but it demands some attention and TLC. Click To TweetHere are 5 content marketing mistakes that might be hurting your brand now…along with some ways to take immediate action and correct them.
1. Not Publishing Enough Content
It’s simple. You need to publish more content these days to be heard.
Typically, one blog post a week, or one email newsletter issue per month, isn’t going to cut it.
Content marketing is about engaging your audience, and that means having a genuine, ongoing conversation with them via regular content publication.
A study by HubSpot backs this up. They found that the more content you manage to publish, the better…with companies posting 16+ times a month getting more than 3.5x the visitors of the “zero to 4” blog post-per-month companies:
Think about it this way. The internet is a weird, wonderful playground that your customers are interacting with every day.
It’s very easy for them to get distracted and forget why they’re doing business with you.
So, if you’re not talking to them, it’s “out of sight, out of mind” — and then your competitors have every reason to seize on the opportunity.
How to wise up: Make sure that you’re publishing content every single week through your most effective channels of engagement, whether that’s your blog, your email list, or your podcast.
(Don’t have a podcast? Maybe it’s time to go beyond the written word…keep reading.)
2. Not Publishing Targeted, Persuasive Content
OK, let’s say you’re on the content marketing grind, putting several pieces of content out there every week. A great step in the right direction.
But, it also has to have a few more essential qualities.
Your content has to be targeted, and it has to be persuasive. And to check off both of those boxes, there are a few things you need to do.
First, to target content effectively, you need a well-developed buyer persona. A buyer persona is a sketch of your customer, imagined as one person — including details about his or her job, lifestyle, needs, and habits — that will inspire effective, engaging totally-rock-your-world content that speaks directly to your audience’s needs.
You can build a fairly good buyer persona by doing a combination of the following:
- Making a list of attributes about current great customers. Who has already bought your products and services, and truly liked them? What kind of customers do you already have a fruitful customer relationship with? What are some notable characteristics about them that might shed light on how you can find and engage similar prospects?
- Doing your homework. Check out where your customers hang out online — whether that’s industry-specific forums, specific social media outlets, or certain niche websites. (The idea is to strategize about getting in front of those likely customers on those platforms.)
- Using tools. MakeMyPersona by HubSpot is a fun-to-use online tool that will get you started crafting a buyer persona in just minutes. You can also do a Google search for “buyer persona templates” that make it easy to clarify who you’re serving — and how you might go after them.
Now, once you have that buyer persona in mind, you’re able to plan and develop content that has real sticking power with your audience.
You’ll know what their interests are…so you’ll be able to strategize on topics and potential headlines that will get your audience’s attention.
You’ll be aware of their needs…so you can communicate the benefits of the solutions you provide through educational, relationship-building blog posts or your email newsletter.
If your approach to content marketing has just been “whatever comes to mind” — or little more than that — you’re likely making the mistake of skipping over people that are ready, right now, to make contact and buy from you.
How to wise up: Use one of the tools listed above to create a well-defined buyer persona. Then use the insights it gives you to craft content that meets your prospect where he or she is, right now.
3. Not Going Beyond the Written Word
If you use only written content in your marketing efforts, you’re only connecting with a portion of your audience.
Why is that? Because we humans are complex creatures — and as the psychologist Howard Gardner of Harvard discovered, we each have our own, unique learning style.
Some people are:
- Visual learners who learn best from pictures and video
- Auditory learners who retain information better when they hear it
- Kinesthetic learners who learn by actually “doing things” and accomplishing tasks physically
- …and there are many other types.
Creating content in a variety of formats, to appeal to each learning style among your audience, will give you a much better chance of content marketing success.
Fortunately, there are a wide variety of content formats you can create:
- Infographics that teach your audience something of value
- Videos to “capture a captive audience” on YouTube, Vimeo, and especially Facebook
- Pictures…which should accompany most forms of written content you produce
- SlideShare presentations you can share with an audience of professionals via your LinkedIn network
- Podcasts for the auditory learners out there…and for anyone who appreciates a more unfiltered, “human” perspective of your business (i.e., most of your customers)
- 3D-Printed objects. That’s right. It’s a new day. If you happen to know via research that a large percentage of your market are kinesthetic learners…and you have the budget…why not?
The possibilities are almost endless. While not every piece of content you put out will appeal to all parts of your audience, it’s important to cover all bases…and serve as many of your ideal customers as possible, in ways they’re most likely to receive your message.
The good thing about diversifying your content types? You don’t have to be 100% original, 100% of the time. According to Curata, 29% of top marketers reuse and repurpose content systematically. That means a great blog post can be spun into a helpful infographic…or a helpful infographic can be a launching pad for a thought-provoking podcast episode.
And while you shouldn’t be tempted to take a haphazard approach — where you do just a little bit of everything and spread yourself so thin, you end up reaching nobody — a big content marketing mistake would be to fail to diversify altogether.
How to wise up: Everything starts with research. Revisit your buyer persona and past customers, and see what kind of content performs the best from the people who buy from you. Emphasize what works, while making room in your editorial calendar for experimentation.
4. Not Being Agile
The word “agile,” for me, brings to mind the image of a super-flexible Olympic gymnast or acrobat, dazzling audiences with feats of physical impossibilities.
Something I’ll never achieve. (And that’s OK.)
Of course, “Agile” refers to a specific process used in software development — one that’s quickly spreading to other industries because it’s just so darn useful — that emphasizes efficient iteration within “sprints,” with continual testing and refinement of ideas.
But to start doing better with your content marketing, it’ll suffice for now to discuss “agile” with a small “a.”
For our purposes, imagine that your digital marketing strategy should be flexible in 2 main ways:
- Adaptable to your market, and
- Responsive to whatever changes are happening among your audience.
And to do that, you have to have your ear to the ground. You need to know what your prospects are talking about…thinking about…worried about.
Enter (in case you haven’t guessed it): social media.
Social media platforms are key to getting inside the heads of your customers, and is the cornerstone of any “agile,” adaptive and responsive approach to content marketing.
To be more specific, you need to do some social listening, first. You want to follow the hot industry topics on Twitter, the nightmares your target market is sharing in their Facebook groups, and the articles they’re discussing on LinkedIn.
(That is, those LinkedIn groups and discussions where people are actually talking to each other, and not just blindly promoting themselves.)
And if your audience tends to hang out on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat…you want to be there too, absorbing their style, learning which influencers they follow, and the kinds of things they relate to.
Then, you want to turn up the dial on your social engagement, whether that means:
- Answering general questions that are relevant to your brand message/products
- Asking the kinds of questions that are likely to get your audience talking
- Chiming in on a hot-button issue (thoughtfully, that is)
- Responding quickly to customer questions or concerns
- Sharing content that addresses pain points and sets your brand up as the go-to source of niche knowledge
Ideally, a mix of all of the above.
Now, remember the goal we’re bringing into focus with social listening and engagement: being agile, in the sense of being adaptive and responsive. When you do social right, you become just that.
You eliminate the risk of your brand becoming dried-up old news — which in our era, happens in weeks and months, rather than years — and you turn your company into a living, breathing creature that grows and changes with the times.
According to a report by Social Media Examiner, 66% of marketers (a clear majority) who spend a minimum of 6 hours a week on their social media outreach channels see a boost in their lead gen efforts.
All that to say, social listening and engagement are too promising…and in fact, too essential to your content marketing success…to ignore.
How to wise up: Build social into your marketing mix. If there’s a particular channel you’ve been ignoring…well, don’t. Explore whether a cross-section of your market hangs out on the channels you haven’t really invested time and resources in, and start listening so you can better engage them with relevant, up-to-the-minute content.
5. Trying To Do It All Yourself
If you’ve read this far, you might have noticed one thing…
That’s a lot of stuff to get right.
It can be completely overwhelming if you attempt to do it all by yourself. (Thus, doing it by yourself is not recommended.)
You’ll want to work with a skilled copywriter or content strategist — ideally, someone who is both of those things — that can help you navigate the ins and outs of:
- Putting enough content out there, so that your message isn’t completely lost among all the noise made by your competitors
- Making sure that content is relevant and persuasive, so that you actually get leads and sales as a result
- Diversifying your content portfolio to appeal to different types of learners among your target market
- Being “agile” through effective social media listening and engagement, so that you actually keep up with your audience in the here and now
The right partner will assess where you are currently, create a strategic plan to address all of those goals, and produce the result-getting content and copy that seals the deal.
How to wise up: Let’s start by having a conversation about your brand and where you want to go with it.
What mistakes have you seen — or even committed — in your content marketing? What did you learn, and how did you change course? Let’s talk about it in the comments below.