Not researching what content your audience wants This is one of the biggest mistakes I see in content marketing today. Most marketers think that any content will drive traffic. In fact, 41.5% of marketers say that their infographics, when compared to other forms of content, saw the most engagement. Your content isn’t evergreen One of the biggest mistakes I made on my blog and with content marketing was lacking evergreen content. For example, topics like my SEO guide that show up on the first page of Google still: Here’s a perfect example of what evergreen traffic looks like in comparison to buzz topics: Evergreen content can drive traffic for multiple years, whereas time-sensitive topics will only give you a short boost in traffic and then ultimately die off. So, are you ready to stop writing about news-style trends and start creating evergreen content? If you’re ready or looking to set up some CTAs, follow these steps: See that bar at the top of my page? Always use a CTA on every content marketing piece if you want to drive more leads. Because everyone is posting new blog posts all the time. The most common ones I see are a lack of research into your audience, not using multiple forms of content distribution, a lack of evergreen topics and not having enough CTAs.
It’s true: content marketing is one of the best ways to bring in new leads.
In fact, I’d say it’s one of the most effective marketing strategies available to us today.
So all you really need to do is write a few 2,000-word blog posts a couple of times a month to become an industry expert, right?
Wrong. If only content marketing was that easy.
The latest and greatest case studies will tout facts and figures that make it seem like anyone can succeed in content marketing.
But content marketing is a crowded, crowded market.
The day isn’t even over yet, and nearly four million blog posts have already been written.
Just do a basic Google search for your blog topic idea, and you’ll probably get millions of results in return.
Meaning that it’s getting tougher and tougher to rank for your target keywords or reach your target audience.
When so many people are blogging about the same topic, the odds of generating leads are slim.
And to top it all off, there are tons of critical mistakes that I see with content marketing every day.
In fact, I used to make some of these mistakes myself.
And until I fixed them, I drove low-traffic numbers and less-quality leads.
But thankfully, I’ve kept track of these mistakes to make sure I don’t make them again in the future.
And now I know exactly what to do instead.
So I’m here to share my hard-learned lessons in the form of four content marketing mistakes to avoid (and what to do instead).
1. Not researching what content your audience wants
This is one of the biggest mistakes I see in content marketing today.
And it’s also the biggest mistake I made when I started my content-marketing journey.
I used to simply read blogs like HubSpot, Adweek, and Entrepreneur to get ideas for my own content.
But what I didn’t realize was most of those topics that gave me ideas weren’t relating to my audience!
My website focuses heavily on growing your business and getting traffic:
It’s all about helping people transform their small businesses into revenue giants.
So writing blog posts that focused on TV advertisements and their success for big brands made no sense.
Sure, it was a cool topic, and it was awesome to learn about their strategy, but it wasn’t relatable.
Small businesses in the B2B sector aren’t paying for million-dollar commercial spots.
So I was missing the mark constantly.
And take a look at this data:
55% of people who get content from brands say that it’s not interesting or relevant to them!
So how do we fix this mistake? How do we deliver better content to the right person at the right time?
Instead of posting content and expecting it to take traction, do this instead.
Research customer interests
You can’t afford not to research what is of interest to your customers.
Posting content that you think is interesting won’t necessarily draw the same appeal to your customer or visitor base.
If you’re an SEO company, posting about PPC likely won’t draw the right kind of traffic.
Most marketers think that any content will drive traffic.
While it might bring some people through the door, it won’t drive the right kind of traffic.
To start understanding your customer’s interests, I recommend heading to the Facebook Ads Manager.
Navigate to your “Audience Insights” tab:
This will give you some crucial data on your audience and the content that appeals to them.
Next, you can select from any of the following audience types:
If you have a big custom audience from remarketing, you can select that.
If you have a large page following, you can select that, too.
Or, simply select “Everyone on Facebook” to browse data on anyone who has interacted with your page.
The next step here is key. Make sure to use the “Interests” section on the left-hand side:
You can use this to type in competitors or industry blogs that relate to your content:
Next, open up the “Page Likes” tab to see what people are engaging with on Facebook:
You should start to see tons of valuable data from the pages that people like who are also interested in the selected interest you chose:
The goal here is to start identifying trends. What common categories are there? What pages are showing up and what do they focus on?
Scroll down, and you can also get a full list of every page:
Instead of posting content and expecting it to gain traction with your audience, you need to start by analyzing your audience.
See what content they actively engage with. See what pages they like and follow.
Then, check out their content and use that information to inform your next piece.
If you don’t like using Facebook, you can also examine similar websites using tools like EpicBeat.
Search for your own website or a closely-related competitor to see what content is most popular on a given URL.
You have tons of options to filter content with this tool. Try filtering by date to see popular content from the past few days or even years:
You can also see what type of engagement the top posts get, and the word counts, too.
Now, just make a list on a spreadsheet of the topics that resonated most and start to write more content surrounding them!
2. Not using multiple forms of content
We’ve all read one. The blog post that has zero images and looks like a page from a history book.
So many big blocks of text and nothing to break it up.
So we add an image, and we think everything is good.
That seems to be the best practice, too:
The majority of top-ranking content-marketing pieces contain at least one image.
But we shouldn’t stop there. That’s not enough.
Just adding an image or two to your content is a mistake.
Why? Because text and images…
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