Are you not getting the results you need from your content marketing? It could be time to check your digital marketing strategy to see if you are making any of these big content marketing mistakes. Learn how you can grow your leads and improve your Click Through Rates (CTR) by delivering information that matters to your audience.
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1. Not Writing for Your Audience
Do you think about who might read your article or watch your video before you start creating it? One of the most common content marketing mistakes is not creating material that speaks to your target audience.
Consider who your ideal customer is before you start putting your words down and tailor your text to meet them at their level.
Engaging content that resonates with your visitors will generate more leads and create more shares. More importantly, you improve the SEO metrics that will help push your site further up the search results page.
Well-written prose or other engaging content is something that your audience will stay around for, regardless of whether they intend to buy something or not. Good content is worth the reader’s time because it solves a problem, is entertaining, or it’s meaningful in some other way that makes it worth sharing.
For a great example of engaging, sharable articles, check out the Wellness Routine section of Asutra’s blog. Each post presents the material in a way that is informative and educational without being salesy. Plus, many of the pieces are guest posts created by qualified and certified industry professionals, which helps to give them weight.
2. Failing to Set Goals
Content marketing mistakes are a lot easier to avoid when you set your goals before you start creating.
Goals help you understand what you need from your blog posts, videos, or social media posts.
Use the SMART marketing formula to help you stay focused. It goes like this:
Specific – A goal needs to focus on just one metric to be specific.
Measurable – This is your goal expressed in a measurable numeric, (e.g. growing your site to 3,000 visitors a month).
Aspirational – An aspirational goal is a challenging one. Without challenge, we stagnate (e.g. creating 2 blog posts a week).
Realistic – All your goals should be achievable (e.g. 2 blog posts may be too much so try doing one a week instead).
Timebound – This is the timeframe for when you would like to reach your goal (e.g 3,000 visitors a month by the end of 12 months).
With a SMART goal-setting strategy you will know what direction your blog needs to move in to start getting the results you need.
3. Using Clickbait Headings
If you want to be taken seriously, you should not use clickbait-type headings to lure readers in. A clickbait headline is designed to attract a click using strong wording to arouse curiosity about what’s hiding behind the link.
Clickbait headlines can be convincing, but many are deliberately misleading.
You know the ones.
No doubt you have seen headlines like “You will not believe what she looks like now!” This type of clickbait usually lures you in with the promise of showing you transformative before and after images of a famous celebrity.
However, you are rarely taken to directly to the personality of interest. Instead, you are forced to wade through pages and pages of a slideshow thick with ads. Unfortunately, the weight of the ads slows the page loading to a crawl.
What you thought would take a few seconds has now turned into 15 minutes of your valuable time. You still didn’t get to see the information you expected, and there are another 63 slides to go.
Clickbait headings tend to deliver high bounce rates. A bounce rate refers to the percentage of people leaving your site without doing anything and returning to the search results.
High bounce rates get noticed by Google, which could deem your content low-quality and penalize your search position.
Another issue with clickbait ads is that arousing curiosity is rarely compatible with sound SEO principles. The trick is to create an attention-grabbing headline that includes your primary keyword while also providing value to your readers.
It takes practice to create great headlines for your articles and videos, but consider it an investment in your business.
4. Forgetting to Optimize Images
Images are often an afterthought for small business owners when developing a content strategy. However, they are crucial for SEO and improving rankings.
They break up your text over a long article and add visual interest to your material. Content with images is also shared more often than articles without them.
Use an image editing tool to reduce the file size of your images before you add them to your post. Large image sizes will slow down your page loading speed.
Google uses page loading speed as an indicator for a good user experience. Plus, people will bounce back to the search results rather than wait more than a few seconds.
Another area often neglected when images are added to a post is the alt tag. The alt tag is an HTML tag where you can insert another instance of your keywords.
Also include a description of your images to make your article more accessible, such as those visitors who will use a text-to-voice reader. This way, they will be able to visualize the images through a verbal description.
As you can guess, not optimizing images can hurt your SEO and push you out of the search engine rankings.
5. Failing to Optimize for Mobile
Mobile is a big deal. Your content needs to work on all formats with any size screen real estate.
Google puts a lot of emphasis on mobile search and wants its customers on those platforms to have a good experience.
Most website platforms have built-in mobile optimization, but it pays to check for yourself how well it’s working.
You can quickly test your mobile optimization by hitting Function key F12 and then selecting CTRL + SHIFT + M simultaneously. You can now resize the screen to suit whatever device you are optimizing for.
Google also provides a free tool to check your content for mobile-friendliness, so make sure you use it on each piece of content.
6. Ignoring Your Tracking Data
Every content marketing strategy needs a plan, and every project needs results tracking.
If you want your article marketing strategy to succeed, you need to know what’s working and what’s not.
Tracking your data will let you know how well each piece is performing. You will then understand what online material is you need more of and what you should kick to the curb.
What platforms are generating the highest ROI, and what type of content got the most engagement? Do you see any trends forming? What’s the breakdown of your target audience?
Use your data to guide you through to a more efficient content marketing strategy and avoid making big content marketing mistakes that waste time and resources.
7. Chasing Quantity Instead of Quality
You publish material to generate traffic, but that’s the only thing you need it to do. Every article and social media post should be created to deliver value.
You can push out 10 posts a day, but if it’s not engaging, helpful, or entertaining, it’s not going to get you any traction. Low-quality that focuses on quantity over quality may even hurt your brand in the long run.
Plus, writing blogs takes time, and even low-quality versions use up resources. Get the most out of your online marketing by making sure you only publish quality articles.
8. Writing for SEO Rather Than People
The search engine algorithms have grown in complexity and their ability to understand the intent behind a piece of writing.
It means we no longer need to use a crazy amount of variants for the same keyword just to make sure your post gets indexed for those words.
Back in the day, it was common to stuff every slight variant of a keyword into an article, such as black dress, black dresses, black dress accessory, black dress accessories; you get the picture.
Many ‘SEO experts’ would create separate pages for every variant to cover their bases, even though they go over the same topic.
It’s a strategy that worked for a while, but the search engines are more intelligent than that these days.
Figuring out the user’s intent is the best way to strategise your article writing. Write naturally, and use keywords and related keywords throughout your text.
It’s also advisable to add your keyword in the title HTML element to make your link in the search results more clickable. >
Google strives to provide the best quality information it can for a given search query. What matters most for SEO is delivering the best answer to that question. Writing that doesn’t do that, regardless of quality, will lose out to content that does.
Stop Making Big Content Marketing Mistakes and Profit
It’s easy to make mistakes when you are not aware of them. Now that you know what not to do, you can stop making the above big content marketing mistakes to improve the results of your digital marketing efforts.
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