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Don’t Make The 7 Deadliest Content Marketing Mistakes!

As you begin to consider rolling out your content marketing strategy, you will make your life a lot easier by avoiding 7 deadly traps. Here’s where too many marketers have gone wrong and wound up in the pit of marketing despair:

1. They fail to research their buyers and their needs. Because they didn’t really understand what was most important to their customers, they couldn’t possibly deliver relevant content that would make a difference.

2. They confuse information that’s important to the business with information
that is important to the customer.  Of course, once prospects are ready to buy, they want to know all about your company.  But, when they first connect with your company, they are looking for solutions to their problems.  They don’t want to read your mission statement or read your latest press release.

3. They don’t integrate their content initiatives with the rest of their marketing programs. Unless you make sure that your entire strategy is customer-centric, one great content marketing effort will be largely wasted.  For example, if you have a great eNewsletter that takes prospects to a web site that doesn’t offer any relevant content, you may have alienated customers forever.

4. They try to dress up sales information as quality content. A surprising number of white papers and webcasts are so thinly disguised that marketers do more harm than good.  Your customers have highly developed B.S. detectors.  They greet the public as poorly disguised wolves in sheep’s clothing.  That’s a baaaaaad practice.

5. They don’t integrate visual elements into their content. Lack of great visuals makes for huge missed opportunities. That’s because unless customers are drawn into the content, they won’t engage with it. On the web, you have less than 10 seconds to engage your visitors.  Relevant visuals can make orders of magnitude differences in a web site’s ability to transform visitors into buyers.

6. They have no measurement process that establishes key benchmarks BEFORE beginning the initiative. Since you can’t manage what you can’t measure, launching a content marketing campaign without a clear set of benchmarks for success, makes it impossible to determine whether hard fought dollars were well spent.

7. They fail to develop content that’s just right for their readers, often aiming too high or too low. Once again, understanding precisely who are customers are makes all the difference. Understanding not just what they need to know, but where they are on the learning curve is critical to creating content that resonates with your prospects.

Learn More About the Basics of Content Marketing

If you’d like to understand why the trend toward content marketing is accelerating–and how you can benefit from deploying a content marketing strategy–Download the FREE eBook, Get Content. Get Customers.  Just click here.