Does your content strategy need some help? Discover how to prevent these typical content marketing errors that might hinder results.

Are you prepared to quit moving your content marketing strategy forward two steps and backward one step at a time?

When you do these frequent blunders in marketing and fall into these traps, you are effectively doing that. You are working against yourself.

There are already too many difficulties; we don’t need to make things even more difficult for ourselves.

Although the epidemic put marketers into a panic and upended the marketing world, it also created new opportunities in the field of content marketing.

From an average of 3.6 billion searches per day before the pandemic to more than 6 billion queries per day after March 2020, there was a dramatic increase in Google search traffic. And there are currently no indications that the tendency is slowing down.

Are you effectively using that increase in organic traffic?

Or are you still using outmoded marketing strategies that are harming your objectives?

Avoid these 12 simple content marketing mistakes.

Before the pandemic, content marketing was undergoing a revolution as more and more authors became aware of its advantages and return on investment.

Over the past few years, content marketing has been driven by changing social media, new technology, and Google search algorithm and SEO standards.

However, the epidemic brought to light exactly how important organic search traffic is as a resource.

Search engine optimization generates more than 100% more traffic than natural social media.

Here are some simple errors to avoid so you may effectively utilize that resource and your content marketing plan.

1. Not Regularly Publishing Blog Content

On the internet, there are more than 1.8 billion websites. Less than 200 million of such websites are active, with around 500 million of them being blogs.

Having a website is good.

It is better to have an active website.

But it’s crucial to have a blog that’s active on your website.

Businesses who blog generate 68% more leads per month on average than businesses that don’t blog.

Benefits of including a constant blog in your content marketing strategy include:

• a rise in natural web traffic.
• easily shareable content for social media.
• exposure through search engine results (SERPs).

Your blog has to become a top focus if it isn’t already.

Since I started posting once a week on my website, we have seen an increase in new client revenue of 90% on average per month. Unquestionably a wise investment!

Include blog posts in your content planning schedule to make sure you have a regular flow of fresh information.

2. Neglecting the Chances for Email and SMS Marketing

Email has seemingly been around forever, but it is still widely used today. 319.6 billion emails are sent and received every day worldwide.

Building a sizable subscriber list with an effective email marketing campaign allows you to keep your brand and service in readers’ minds.

The average return on investment (ROI) for emails is $42 for every $1 invested, whereas top performers report a ROI of more than $70 for every $1 invested.

Your email open rates may be increased by:

• making your emails mobile-friendly.
• incorporating various CTAs into your content.
• utilizing unique social media links.
• making compelling topic lines.

Using SMS marketing in addition to email marketing is unquestionably a good idea.

3. A social media failure

Content marketers may reach a large audience for free through social media platforms, yet we misuse the cutting-edge technologies at our disposal much too frequently.

We’re missing simple opportunities because we don’t understand the audience, pay attention to our rivals, and interact with social media users.

Your reach efforts will greatly benefit from scheduling posts on the most popular social media platforms and from paying attention to how your audience engages with your content to make sure you’re posting what they want to see.

You should create a social media presence if you don’t already.

If you do have one but don’t post frequently, start doing so right now.

4. Failure to Proofread

Sounds too easy, don’t you think?

However, for those of us with an eye for language and spelling, misusing terms like their, there, and they’re is more offensive than just unpleasant.

It’s vs its, improper use of apostrophes, and neglecting to make subjects and verbs agree in a phrase are additional all-too-common errors.

Utilize a spell-checker. Consider using the Grammarly browser plugin. Check your text for grammar errors with a second pair of eyes, if possible. Hire a copyeditor before publishing.

Nothing in internet writing is more unprofessional than misspelled words or carelessly placed apostrophes, in my opinion.

5. Failure to Follow SEO Best Practices

In the field of search engine optimization, the confluence of ever-evolving techniques, shifting algorithms, and new AI technologies create their own obstacles, but that is no justification for being disorganized.

You’re losing out on top rankings that could have been simple to obtain by ignoring relevant content development, failing to target long-tail keywords (or worse – using the antiquated practice of keyword stuffing), and allowing content to become stale.

6. Quantity Is Priority Over Quality

For a while now, there has been a trend among bloggers toward more introspective, reliable, and well-written posts.

In 2014, a blog article took an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes to write. The typical duration in 2020 was 3 hours 55 minutes.

The goal of SEO is to provide high-quality content that is valuable, relevant, well-written, organized, and simple to read. Producing a lot of material rapidly won’t do this.

7. Putting Out Pointless Content

If you don’t know your target audience, your content marketing plan will fail even if you put in the time and effort to create well-written pieces that are supported by reliable sources and optimized for SEO.

Although it may hurt your feelings, readers—not you—determine if your content is worthwhile. If you want to have any chance of visitors even clicking on your material, much alone reading and engaging with it, you must accommodate their tastes.

Do you believe that readers of a post on a new smoothie recipe on a website about CRM software and the customer service sector will find it interesting, for instance?

Most likely not.

When content creators take the time to comprehend their audience, they are better able to produce high-quality content that does more than simply fill pages.

8. Failure to Change Up Your Marketing Methods

Have you heard the expression “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”?

Similarly, don’t devote all of your marketing efforts to a single strategy.

Today’s marketers must manage a plethora of channels and tactics. Consider the numerous strategies used only in social media: images, text, site content, captions, videos, user-generated content, interactive storytelling, infographics, etc.

Even the same social media strategies don’t work everywhere. A brand will have a different TikTok approach than it does for Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Add to that the use of blogs and SEO, email and SMS marketing, webinars, online and offline trade exhibitions, and the list is endless.

While you shouldn’t strive to handle every single marketing strategy on every channel accessible with your limited resources, you should vary your strategy and aim for at least a few distinct channels.

9. Lack of Content Goals

Every content marketer should aim to raise brand recognition, increase website traffic, and provide unique material for a particular demographic.

But aiming blindly in the dark seldom results in those KPIs being met. A content marketing approach has been used by 65% of the most effective content marketers. 56% of marketers have been using technology to research and comprehend the habits and preferences of their target audiences.

Generating an audience profile, creating a keyword list based on their search terms, figuring out the material they require, and writing in a way that your readers will enjoy are the first steps in setting content objectives.

After that, you need a strategy to determine how frequently and through which channels to post. Although publishing blog entries will differ slightly from publishing tweets, how frequently you do it will rely on your audience and any potential demands they may have.

Since content strategy is the cornerstone upon which everything else is constructed.

10. Failure to Mobile-Optimize

Do you believe you look at your phone frequently?

The answer is a lot, if you’re like the majority of Americans.

How dependent are we really? Here are some recent figures that may or may not surprise you:

Americans check their phones 262 times every day, or once every 5.5 minutes, on average.

52% of people claim they have never gone more than 24 hours without using their phone.

When their phone battery is less than 50%, 54% of individuals report they become anxious.

These figures alone show that it is a grave error to fail to optimize websites and online content for mobile consumers.

The way we communicate with, interact with, and connect with our favorite companies has been dramatically transformed by mobile devices.

Mobile users have limited attention spans as a result. They want concise, to-the-point information that is arranged with lists and headers to make it simple to skim.

11. Not Considering Customer Outreach

It’s bad enough when clients shout at your representatives over the phone or write hostile emails to express their displeasure.

However, in the age of social media and customer expectations for prompt reactions from firms, it has almost become routine for disgruntled customers to air their complaints in public on digital platforms for everyone to see.

According to the 2020 National Consumer Rage Study, consumer complaints made through digital channels have increased three times more than those made over the phone or in person. And given that 48% of American customers base their judgment of a company’s value on its social media presence, this may be a major issue.

It’s bad for business to ignore those irate customers. A red flag that suggests potential customers shouldn’t spend their money with a company is when they see a lot of angry comments met with silence from the brand.

Likewise, keep in mind that your response will be seen by everyone and will be scrutinized, so choose your words wisely.

Your best course of action is to respond with genuine concern that a client’s requirements haven’t been addressed, then make an effort to reroute the irate customer away from the public platform and into a private channel, such an email, a direct message, or a phone call, where you can handle the matter.

12. Not Monitoring Analysis Data

Circling back to examine the data is a crucial step in developing a successful, high-performing content marketing plan.

Examine previous campaigns to see which ones succeeded and which ones failed.

What patterns do you see? What is the demographic breakdown of your target market?

Which platforms provided the best return on investment? What kind of material received the greatest interaction from your users?

Use your data to measure the most crucial campaign KPIs, determine their level of success, and then incorporate the lessons you learn into your future content strategy as it changes over time.

Do not make the avoidable marketing errors.

All of us are human.

People make errors. That’s nothing to feel embarrassed of.

Failure may be an unforgiving but effective teaching.

However, being aware of what to avoid can help us continue on the correct path, which can help us avoid mistakes and encounter fewer setbacks.