Building a content strategy for your business is important to ensure exposure and dominance within your sector, especially if you have a digital strategy in place. Though, when it comes to actually putting together the content strategy, many companies are falling victim to a list of common mistakes. By making one or several of these errors, it could affect the overall success of your content creation and result in being a waste of both time and money. See below the five most common mistakes made when putting together a content strategy.
1. Focusing on yourself instead of the buyer
When writing for your readers it is critical that you focus your content creation on the buyer and not your business. It’s important that you don’t mention your business throughout the copy and instead leave the reference until the end of the article, most preferably through the call of action. It’s also important that you teach your reader how to solve a problem, while also reaching out for help, rather than bragging about your abilities to solve the issue for them. By being subtle about your approach, you build a foundation of trust between them and your business. Your goal should be to have individuals share your content creation across digital platforms, so you present yourself as an authority within your industry, not an everyday sales person.
2. Not reporting, tracking or measuring results
What’s the point of posting and sharing your time-consuming content if you aren’t going to track how well it was portrayed? While many individuals are spending loads of time with their content strategy, they are failing to keep up-to-date with how it is tracking through reporting and measuring. A 2015 B2B Content Marketing Report found only 5% of businesses were successfully tracking the success of their content marketing plan and 15% thought reporting wasn’t a crucial step.
A 2015 B2B Content Marketing Report found only 5% of businesses were successfully tracking the success of their content marketing plan and 15% thought reporting wasn’t a crucial step.
13% of businesses claimed measuring their success wasn’t a priority to them, while 49% said they found it difficult to measure the effectiveness of their content creation – despite having numerous available tracking tools. By staying on-top and measuring each piece of content you distribute, it helps you develop a true understanding of your audience, as well as their needs and wants. With this extra knowledge, it makes it easier on you and your team to brainstorm effective content creation ideas for your digital platforms.
3. Failure to use a variety of content formats
Bombarding your audience with endless 800-plus word blogs can become boring and a waste of time. In this day in age, your audience don’t have the time to sit and read through a text-filled article and instead prefer to interact with visual components, such as pictures, infographics and videos. Despite the demand for this type of content, producers are continually failing to include a range of these formats as part of their content strategy. Recent research found 10% of content managers don’t believe in mixing up their type of materials within their content marketing plans. A 2016 Hubspot Marketing Statistics Report discovered that 51% of marketing professionals have labelled video as the type of content with the best ROI (Return On Investment).
4. Not using SEO successfully to enhance content
It’s easy to plan, write and distribute pieces as part of your content strategy, but you must also ensure you are using SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) successfully. Many businesses are forgetting to enhance their copy with SEO tips, resulting in their content creation not being moved higher on search engines and receiving a low traffic figure. It is important to remember to use SEO keywords and phrases within your content header and body, in a bid to become a reliable source within the engines, such as Google and Yahoo. The more content you produce that incorporates keywords throughout the article, the higher your website will rank on search and the more website traffic you will generate.
5. Not distributing content creation correctly on multiple platforms
What’s the point of writing great content if no one is going to see it, right? That is why it is so important to make sure you distribute your content across multiple platforms. At the moment, there are many businesses that are ignoring this crucial step in a content strategy. By forgetting to do this, they are experiencing low readership numbers and very little success within the buyer’s funnel. To have a reliable following, as well as success, you need to tell the world of the internet that your hard work is there and ready to be reviewed. You should use a number of social sharing platforms – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, etc. – to get your content out in the world. Also, content creation can be circulated across websites via a number of distribution network sites, such as; Media Cloud and Flexi Hosting.