You’ve waited the requisite amount of time, but your content marketing efforts aren’t generating leads, let alone sales. But you know content marketing is a good idea; you’ve seen the stats. So why are you getting little or no results? Well, it could be that you’re making mistakes that are undermining your goals. Below are four common content marketing mistakes and suggestions for turning things around:
1. You’re selling instead of informing
A director of data governance once had an extremely negative reaction when I suggested white papers as a source of information. He said that none of the white papers he’d read had been useful, even when their titles promised educational content. They’d just been promoting a product or service. Now, he saw all white papers as useless.
Note: The good news is that director is still in the minority. DemandGen Report’s 2019 Content Preferences Survey found that 56% of respondents saw white papers as valuable resources for the early stage of the buyer’s journey. But it’s a reminder that content marketing misdeeds can cause real problems for the rest of us.
One way around this content marketing mistake is pointing out the benefits of your type of product or service. For example, if your offering automates a task or process, describe (in general terms) how that type of automation facilitates work flow. You could also include a link to content that explicitly discusses how your particular product accomplishes the task.
2. You don’t have a content plan/strategy
According to the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, 25% of B2B marketers don’t have a content strategy. If you haven’t created a plan, your content efforts are much more likely to be haphazard. That’s because you’ll have only a vague idea of what you’re trying to achieve. And that makes it hard to know what works, what needs tweaking, or even what you should be creating.
So, write down your strategy. You’ve probably heard that writing down goals makes it more likely that you’ll achieve them. That principle holds true for your content marketing; documenting it will give you clarity, focus, and (hopefully) motivation. If you haven’t done this, the Content Marketing Institute can walk you through the process with their “A Simple Approach to Document Your Content Marketing Strategy” blog post.
3. You’re not promoting your content
While your content promotes your expertise, product, or service, you need to promote the content. In this world of information overload, a “build it and they will come” approach just results in few prospects ever seeing your content.
With all the online options available nowadays, you have an abundance of opportunities for content promotion. Identify the online venues where you can find your prospects and customers and then adopt tactics like those in Neil Patel’s blog post “17 Advanced Methods for Promoting Your New Piece of Content.”
4. You’re using jargon that confuses your audience
At the Techwell blog, software tester Justin Rohrman wrote about commonly-used phrases in the field having different meanings for different people. Many technology-oriented companies develop an internal language that differs from what others in the field would use to describe particular processes, products, or concepts.
So double check that you aren’t using terms that will confuse your external audiences when you’re developing content for them (or communicating with them in any way). Otherwise, that language confusion could cause them to doubt your expertise or just frustrate them.
If you want to use a term that you’ve developed internally, you’re going to have to spend time explaining it to your target market. For example, in the early 2000s, Leslie Eicher of Eicher Communications and Charlotte Andrist of Nickel Communications coined the term “Collaborative Classroom System” for a global interactive education vendor. Then they devised a program to position the vendor with regard to that term.
Conclusion
If you’ve found that any of these four content marketing mistakes are indeed sabotaging your efforts, then the good news is that you now know what to do to fix things! Get to fixing the mistake, and I wish you great content marketing ROI!
