How to Avoid Common Content Marketing Pitfalls
For businesses to remain omnipresent, producing good, quality content is vital.
So, teams of content marketers work to produce emails, blog articles, videos, infographics, social posts, and more for every stage of the funnel.
But sometimes, the team dynamic can cause bottlenecks and prevent good content from ever emerging. And it’s not because what many would think is obvious – the more hands touching, the worse it becomes. It’s about ensuring you have the foundational platforms and guides in place to help your business avoid the following common content marketing pitfalls.
Lacking a Mission
Readers expect the voice of a brand to remain consistent throughout their journey. So, companies that do not clearly define what they stand for confuse their audience by writing for every persona and waste their resources by publishing content that doesn’t map the funnel.
The necessary first step is to declare a mission that excites your audience and servers your interest. Answer the questions, “what do you do” and “what change do you want to see in the world?” Now, you have your mission and your vision to guide all that you create.
IBM exhibits the esteem brand image and mission in every aspect of their social marketing campaign utilizing a blend of videos, photography, trending hashtags, and employee profiles.
Missing A Style Guide
Not having a guide for editors and proofreaders to check against halts productivity. Rather than hitting desired deadlines, hours are spent debating the company’s stance on oxford commas.
Without a rubric to judge good writing, everyone has their own ideas, and executive titles alone should not bestow writing expertise.
A style guide also helps define a process, outline each review level’s expectations, and establish timeframes. Therefore, empowering writers and project managers to enforce the process.
Mail Chimp does a fantastic job in their style guide of breaking down the main components. They include goals, types of audiences, voice and tone, copyright and trademarks, and word list. There is a bookmark for each section so that content creators can jump straight to the section they’re looking for.
Neglecting Research
Companies often think they are saving time and money by not allocating the resources needed to study their audience. But really, a business cannot afford not to arm their content marketers with this essential information.
Knowing the interests and preferences of your company’s audience will keep you ahead of the game. It’s these actionable insights, drawn from research, that will keep your messaging relevant and competitive in any market.
When you allow your team to get the answers, they need to inform your major selling tools; you will reap the rewards.
Nike released the ‘Find Your Greatness’ campaign (encouraging everyone to excel as athletes, regardless of ability) was developed with data-driven personas in mind. The campaign is an ideal example of marketing that resonates by appealing to their target consumers’ emotions while challenging common perceptions of the brand – in this case; it’s not just for professional athletes.
Not Tracking Performance
What’s the CTR on all those eBooks?
If you are not tracking the success of your content you are spending all that time and money producing, it would be just as useful to throw away the money.
At regularly scheduled intervals, review your Google Analytics or marketing automation tracker. Look at the numbers, establish a baseline, set hypotheses, and judge success based on past performance. This is how you can prove the value of your marketing efforts.
And as marketing continues to evolve, it’s important to evaluate and improve your efforts and make decisions based on real data.
We were thrilled to get the data back, proving the success of a recent client rebrand effort.
Social media engagement soared:
34% increase in LinkedIn followers
61% increase in Instagram followers.
Here are the examples that drove top impression and CTR.
Moving towards your 2021 plan, having these internal processes and guides in place will help align your marketing efforts and ensure your continued success.
Leave us a comment to let us know how we are doing or if you need assistance with any of those efforts. We’re here to help.
