3 Content Marketing Gaffes Small Businesses Should Avoid At All Costs
When you’re running a small business you often have to do everything on your own. This is great for saving costs, but can cause problems if you’re not familiar with the subject. In this article we look at some mistakes you need to avoid in your content marketing strategy.
Aside from listing your small business in online trade directories, creating great content that people would love to read and share is a great way to improve the search rankings of your business. When people share an informational or interesting piece of content created by you, they inadvertently build a network of references that link back to your site.
Content marketing is a great digital marketing tool—when it’s in the right hands. It’s very easy for novice content marketing teams to go wrong with their content strategy, which can backfire on your revenues. While you may not be a digital marketing expert yourself, knowing right from wrong can help you choose the right digital agency for the job.
Here are 3 content marketing mistakes to avoid, whether you do it yourself or hire experts to do it for you.
Not knowing your audience and their preferences
The personas of your existing and potential customers determine what content you create and how you market it. You need to know the likes, dislikes, needs and wants of your customers (or readers, if you have a blog) to be able to generate high-quality custom content that addresses these factors.
Whether you’re selling baby products to new mothers or preloved cars to middle-aged men and women, you need to convey to your content management team who your target audience is and what you want your content to achieve.
That said, do rest assured that a seasoned digital marketing team will happily guide you on the what, why and how of great content.
Not founding your content marketing strategy on specific, timed goals
Why are you creating and marketing content at war footing? What is the goal you wish to achieve through the process? Is that goal based on accurate and reliable data or just on your hunch? Have you set a time period by which your content strategy should have met most if not all of your goals?
These are only some of the questions you need to put forward to your content marketing experts. However, if they know what they’re doing, you won’t have to ask. They will give you a measurable and practical content management plan aligned with your business goals.
Not giving due importance to the quality of the content
According to content experts at the leading digital agency Submitcore, online content created for a small local business—whether it’s an infographic, video or blog post—should follow 5 key principles:
- It should answer a query or resolve a problem.
- If it’s an article or a blog post, it should be written in a language free of jargon and grammatical errors.
- It should be unique, engaging and worthy of the reader’s time.
- It should have variety (posting only blog links on your Facebook business page will make your followers turn to other, more easily consumable content).
- And, lastly, it should be promoted well (even the best of content is of no use if it’s not visible to your potential customers).
