As more businesses invest on digital platforms, content has been greatly identified as KING. Without content, a content marketer would not be able to effectively communicate to his or her target audience. Content being the key message carrier can be in text, image, video or audio depending on the choice of business.

Content marketing focuses on the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience in order to drive profitable customer action.

For instance, good content marketing should help customers make decisive decisions on buying while building on personal brand and customer relationships. Well-crafted content can draw traffic to your website and social media accounts, boost your performance on search results pages, and give audiences the opportunity to share your content with their friends.

For any content marketer, there are various pitfalls that that can truly affect the intend purpose of your content. These mistakes can lead to either you getting the wrong audience or underwhelming conversations as interrogated.

1. Planning poorly from the start

Before you pack the tour bag, planning is essential. Failure to properly schedule, articulate the purpose for the trip will leave you a dissatisfied traveler or worst case scenario, total failure on the tour. Similarly, for your content marketing and execution plan to work out, you MUST plan of who or what content you need when finally you share.

What is your mission? Who is your target audience? Do you want to generate leads, drive traffic to your website, build awareness, build customer loyalty or support your customer service? Draw a plan clearly highlighting what you want to achieve.

 2. Poor and invaluable developed content

Content is KING. Useless, insufficient and mediocre content is never paid attention to. Poorly created content is never well received. Focus on creating content that is creative, attractive, useful and satisfying to increase the organic reach through your
audience will to engage and share willingly.

Before you hit the post button ask yourself; does it evoke emotions and action? Is it educational, visually stunning and well detailed? To ensure that you address these queries, reread what you share. Does it move you? Do you like it? Can it drive you to purchase or call to action?

Focus on building a good relationship between the customer and your content. Well created content with excellent choice of words can get you a better Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

3. Not knowing your customers

Whose problem does the content want to solve? By knowing your target audience you will understand the type of content they need. This can be achieved through proper primary and secondary research. You can speak to your prospective customers face-to-face or consult Google Analytics to understand their behavior.

By taking time to understand your customers, you can easily solve their problems through content on digital platforms. This will easily boost your content.

Create content that is ideal to your target audience. Marry what the company wants to talk about with what the audience wants to hear. Don’t force content on the customer. This might crush your mission.

4. Unclear measurement of what you want to achieve and analytics

Before you set off deduce clearly what are your goals? How many impressions, audience and engagements do you want to reach? How many website clicks are you aiming at?

Create the objectives, goals, key performance indicators (KPIs) targets and the segments that you will use to meet all your objectives. Do research to understand the content marketing execution plan.

5. Lack of use of paid content

Give your content a chance to reach thousands and millions rather than just depend on the followers on your pages. Your content can be pushed through paid promotions. Spend to get more customers who will be interested in your products and service rather than depend on your platforms fans.

Ensure that your content is sharable and engaging after boosting in order to gain. The more people you reach, the higher the engagement rate.  For instance, linking your Facebook page to your Instagram account can automatically synchronize the promoted link. This will tremendously boost the audience reach.

Hashtags can be sponsored too on twitter or single tweet promotion. Most social media platforms allow promotion at affordable rates ranging from 2 dollars. Make use of them.

6. Poorly approached SEO

Search Engine Optimization is a MUST for any business and brand. SEO helps in driving traffic to the websites and decrease the cost of customer acquisition efforts. In order to achieve this, keywords are critical. Make use of popular words themes, hashtags that provide relation to the types of topics, questions, ideas and solutions that most people might be searching online.

In the case of web and blog content, add the sharing buttons to other social media platforms so as to enable your audience share the content hence increasing the audience reach.

Additionally, make use of journalists, bloggers, thought leaders and fellow marketers to help in reaching a wider scope of audience.

7. You are too salesy

One of the major problems that business content marketers focus on is over selling rather than educate the customers on how to use the products through demonstrations and share experiences. It is boring to read selling content repeatedly from the same company or source.

Focus on the benefits of the message shared to the customers. You can use testimonials to educate them on how to properly make use of the products and to uplift them in accordance to the aim. By establishing credibility and trust in customers you evoke their purchasing power.

Furthermore, provide assistance to the existing and future customers by educating them on purchase decisions.

8. Your content isn’t useful

Does your content solve the customer’s problem(s)? Does it answer the questions the customers are looking for? If facial oil that removes pimples, will it solve the problem?

To create useful content, you will need to: 

• Start with the end goal in mind
• Answer the question “So What?”. Put yourself in the shoes of the target audience and know the exact answer you will love to hear
• Site examples of problems and how you look forward to solve them
• Structure the content to communicate
• Write to an individual and not a crowd. As much as you have a large audience, remember everyone will read solely.
• Create different content scripts, choose the best and edit it tactfully before you post.

9. Failure to engage with customers

Look forward to creating content that is engaging. Does it evoke more questions from the customers?

For example; where can one get the products and services? Address their concerns in case they ask questions in the comment section. Better content has positive
comments, likes and sharing than one with a high reach without any likes, comments and sharing.

10. Neglecting set time schedules

Inconsistent publishing might chase away customers who might be big fans of your content. Remember, if content is KING, frequency is QUEEN and consistency is the MASTER. Keep your time schedule on track. You can break down your schedule approach to suit different audience.

For instance, in the morning post inspiration content, in the afternoon educational
content and in the evening entertainment content. This can draw different people to your pages at different times.

11. Inadequate content marketing expertise

Taking time to conceptualize and understand all the holistic requirements of content marketing will endear you more to your audience. Be the buyer; be passionate about what you are developing, be the strategic planner of the content, show a command in what you write like someone who fully understands what he or she is doing. You can never create good content if you don’t have passion for it.

Understand what your company is known for and do your best to give the customers what they are interested and passionate about. Come out as the expert.

12. Inadequate knowledge on creativity

Test your content with different topics. It can be in the format of entertainment, inspiration, convincing and educational. Take time to create content on different issues in order to engage more audience across the board. This is a good way to increase web traffic. You can play around with different titles to gain attention from different age groups on your shared pages.

13. Failure to use visual marketing aids

Our brains can easily process images than it can process texts. Do not neglect to use videos, info graphics, pictures, posters and memes. Use them correctly, however don’t overdo it.

14. Not being human friendly

Focus on the buyer and not you or the content. Make the content human friendly. The kind of words and visuals you use should not be offensive rather attractive to the target audience. Remember your main focus is to get the customer interested in order to act accordingly as desired by you the content creator. The same way you will want to be approached is exactly how she wants to be approached. Employ the different human friendly aspects so as not to offend potential customers in anyway and influence their purchasing power negatively.

15. Lack of mobile friendly content

Every day, the smart mobile phones are becoming indispensable as a way of life across the world. Some websites do not allow one to navigate from desktop mode to mobile mode which will bar a number of mobile users to accessing content. Ensure that content can be accessed on different mobile service providers and platforms to encourage a higher reach.

Conclusion

In my summation, always remember content is KING. Be creative and ensure that it’s thoroughly engaging for the customer to act accordingly. Key mistakes and failures will leave your audience with a bad experience which might make life hard for you as a content marketer. Always ensure your content captures the spirit of all your audience.