Content marketing is a great internet marketing instrument. The main goal of content marketing is selling products and services – as well as building a strong online presence and brand – but to get to those goals you use subtler, more elegant approaches.
Content marketing pampers visitors with valuable content before guiding them through the purchase decision making process.
Although content marketing is a very effective instrument to use as part of your internet marketing efforts, there are a lot of mistakes that can turn this instrument into a disaster. In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at the top 3 content marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.
Rushing Through the Cycle
One of the most common content marketing mistakes is rushing through the cycle. We see this mistake being made by “experts” all the time. Instead of focusing on the content and the users, a lot of site owners rush towards adding a call to action at the end of each article.
Hard-selling is a big no-no in content marketing. In fact, your articles will start to look like advertorials and not genuine articles once you start adding too many ads and calls to action here and there. It’s a mistake that you can avoid easily too.
Let your users go through their own decision making processes naturally. You can occasionally talk about ways to optimize the use of your products or services. You can even discuss how your products can help users solve specific problems. Simply avoid the classic buy-now call and you’ll be able to keep your content marketing campaign on track.
Relying on Content Marketing Online
I’ve said it before and I will say it again: content marketing is great in many ways. Relying solely on content marketing and expecting magical results, however, is among the many mistakes you can make as you venture into the world of internet marketing.
It’s okay to combine content marketing with other internet marketing instruments. In fact, this is something you should always do. When you’re just getting started, for instance, you can gain a lot of traction and exposure by channeling your content through the best creative management platform.
Even paid ads can be great. Do native advertising until you can write for reputable sites as a guest writer. Place ads to direct a specific target audience to your quality content. Jumpstart your site and let your internet marketing campaign grow further.
One-Way Communication
A few years ago, posting content and expecting users to come in the thousands may have been acceptable. Today, however, there are two more factors to consider: engagement and user experience. Users aren’t only looking for valuable content. They expect to have a great time finding and reading the content too.
On top of that, you also need to react to user engagement properly. Answer questions, maintain healthy social media pages with a lot of exchanges and make sure you allow users to interact further with the content and your site in general. After all, you already have a good content marketing campaign in place; why not push the value of your content further and increase user engagement?
Bill Clark is a freelance journalist who specializes in writing about culture and the arts, however will write about anything that piques his interest including business, travel and lifestyle. @BilboClark01
