Posted by What are you doing to connect to your audience? Does your reputation establishment campaign put a focus on marketing? The days of traditional outbound campaigns are long gone. Today’s audience wants to get something useful and fun from its interaction with brands.
Using content marketing as a part of the overall marketing strategy has become equally important for big enterprises and small family businesses. Over the years, content marketing proved its credibility – a recent survey shows that 53 percent of businesses invest time and money in content marketing.
The reason for such investment is simple – it pays back. Content market is a cost-efficient option to catch the user’s attention in an environment that buzzes with tons of data and engagement opportunities.
Even startups can reap the benefits of small business content marketing. According to HubSpot data, small businesses that blog regularly get 126 percent more lead growth in comparison to their rivals.
While the importance of content marketing is easy to understand, companies still struggle with the creation of engaging and meaningful strategies than convert. As social media and mobile technologies evolve, coming up with unique content marketing ideas becomes tougher than ever. Certain mistakes tend to be quite common and here are five of those.
No Awareness of What Content Marketing Entails in Terms of Writing
Everybody knows that Content is king in the digital realm but some still believe that writing for the web is a piece of cake. All that you need are great content marketing ideas, right? This isn’t exactly the case.
The way that people search, read and share information changes every year – it’s not just Google algorithm updates anymore. You have to bear in mind that mobile traffic in 2017 represented 52.64 percent of the global traffic. The share is still growing. Looking for content via a mobile device is a specific process that is changing SEO content marketing as well as the overall approach businesses have towards information dissemination.
Writing for web is all about:
- Keeping it simple – reading on a screen is not the same as reading a printed text
- Putting emphasis on the most important information via formatting
- Getting rid of lengthy explanations and large chunks of text
- Developing niche topics that will shape up your reputation in the field
- Thinking about content that’s easy to share and that will appeal to a wide range of audiences
- Keeping SEO elements in mind
- Keeping the competition in mind to avoid duplicates and benefit from originality
Small business content marketing isn’t the same as writing an essay or a promo page for a print publication. There are rules to be followed and these rules will change quite often.
If you have no experience, chances are that you’ll struggle and you’ll fail getting the results you’re hoping for. Using professional copywriting services in such instances will save you time, money and the headache, plus it will help you reach new potential customers.
No Idea about the Target Audience
According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), content marketing aims to “engage a clearly defined and understood target audience.” When you work on your SEO content marketing, you create a strategy for a specific audience.
Knowing your target is the key to creating text, video, infographics and even live streams that will engage and yield a high ROI.
If you want your content marketing to succeed, you need to define a target audience that will be interested in what you have to offer. Even more, create buyer personas and write content specifically for them. Your buyer persona will impact:
- The topic selection
- The content formats that you use
- The frequency of posting updates
- The style, tone and language complexity you use
- Dissemination channel selection for the purpose of getting more people to see your content
Generic content isn’t going to cut it. Content without focus isn’t going to cut it. If you’re not speaking to a certain person, your content marketing ideas will fail.
Relying on Recycled Content Marketing Ideas
Are your content marketing ideas both fresh and evergreen?
What’s the easiest thing you can do when you’re idealess but you still need to do effective small business content marketing? You can recycle a topic you’ve done in the past. You can see what the competition is doing and attempt to put together something similar.
Guess what, today’s online audience isn’t gullible.
If you fail offering quality, chances are that you will lose your audience pretty fast. A good content marketing strategy is a quest towards originality, an ongoing effort to surprise, excite and educate readers.
The typical internet user has a short attention span. They are spoiled with information and winning them over depends on how creative your content is.
If you want to create truly engaging and interesting content, pay attention to actual problems your audience faces – what are their most common questions? Create a poll or a questionnaire to understand their opinions and interests. Check your Google Analytics to identify hot topics and do follow-ups on those. Data is your friend when it comes to generating content marketing ideas.
Excessive Focus on Promotion
Gone are the days when you could use slogans like “big sale“or “unparalleled offer” to get an audience engaged. People are no longer fooled by straightforward promotion. You have to make an effort and come up with creative content marketing ideas.
Content that’s overly promotional or featuring straightforward advertising will be perceived as spam. If people don’t get something from the texts you write and the videos you shoot, they’ll never come back for more.
The direct responsibility of content isn’t to sell (although you can accomplish this goal). It’s to build your reputation and provoke an emotional response. Getting people to respond emotionally forms an attachment to the brand that you can rely on later on.
Emotional attachment drives brand recognition up. In a world where people can choose among dozens of products and services, this is the one thing you can count on.
Attempting to be a pushy salesman through the content you create will fail miserably. Instead, invest in becoming the authority in the niche. When people can turn to you for useful information, they will also remember to turn to you when they need products or services in the niche.
No Strategy to Guide Content Marketing Efforts
All your efforts for creating, targeting and promoting content will be useless without a consistent marketing plan. Writing for the sake of writing doesn’t do content promotion any good if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish.
The basics of every content strategy include:
- Defining your target audience
- Pinpointing content marketing ideas on the basis of audience interests
- Choosing the right content formats
- Identifying channels for publishing and promotion
- Choosing metrics to track
- Analyzing metrics and modifying the approach on the basis of results
A content marketing strategy helps you achieve consistency in your SEO and content marketing efforts. You can’t rely on a single blog post to bring high traffic for a long period of time. When you manage to gain attention, you will need to meet the same expectations time and time again.
Coming up with content marketing ideas is just the first part of the process. You have to learn how to see the big picture and what you can accomplish through the creation of unique, original and informative content. If you lack the skills, the knowledge or the time, we can help you get there. Please don’t hesitate to contact our team with inquiries about the best strategy for the promotion of your business.