Raise your hand if you find content marketing hard.
Let’s face it; we’ve all made our fair share of content marketing mistakes.
You might have spent hours sweating over a blog post and forgot to add a captivating headline. You might have forgotten to focus the post on your ideal customer, or you might even have neglected to think about search engines.
Is content marketing a challenge for you?
It doesn’t need to be hard. You’re going to learn from my mistakes and discover the most important advice I’ve found for executing a successful content marketing strategy.
Today I’ll be guiding you through six of the mistakes I’ve made throughout the last 12 months. I’ve tried lots of strategies, tested lots of new ideas and written over 80 pieces of content. I’ll show you what didn’t work and what you can do to avoid my mistakes.
Before getting stuck into the mistakes I made, I want to highlight some of our achievements to give you an idea of what is achievable with a content marketing strategy.
- The first three months was a trickle, lucky to get 500 visits a month, mainly via social media
- After three months we made a strategic decision to broaden our target audience and go after a slightly different market
- As a result, things have boomed, we went from 500 visits a month to over 12,000 a month
- Our blog is building a strong authority in our niche topics which helped all our articles rank better
Our content strategy is now BOOMING, but it’s taken longer than it really needed. By avoiding these common content marketing mistakes, you should be able to get there in half the time.
“Even when you are marketing to your entire audience or customer base, you are still simply speaking to a single human at any given time. Worry less about sounding professional and worry more about creating remarkable content that other humans can relate to.” – Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs
1. Didn’t understand buyer persona and their problems
When I first started, we didn’t have too much strategy when it came to buyer personas or knowing our audience. Initially, we were very specific with going after ‘directors, decision makers’ for managed IT service providers.
This was ok, so we knew roughly who, but we went about reaching them the wrong way. We created content that solved problems for them, but wasn’t directly linked to our actual products core features.
As a result, there was a disconnect between our content and our solution (which was or product). So we were generating a bunch of leads from people that were our target market or ‘buyer persona’, but weren’t experiencing the pain or problems that our product could solve.
Remember to know your buyer persona’s real pain points or problems that you can help with. Create content around those problems and position your product or service as a solution to help.
2. Didn’t understand the need to create content for different stages in the buyer’s journey
The next mistake I made was I didn’t know the concept of ‘the buyer’s journey’. The buyer’s journey is what every customer takes when making a purchase. As a marketer, you must track and nurture customers through the buyers journey, right from initial contact, too the close of the deal.
Since I didn’t understand it, I wasn’t able to create specific content for the different stages (awareness, consideration and decision). As a result, I was had to way to strategically push leads from one stage of the journey to the next.
When it comes to converting leads into sales, this really held back our content marketing efforts. We were doing a great job at creating a lot of interest at the top, but struggled to convert these guys down into customers.
Once I recognised the mistake we were making, I went about producing more ‘consideration content’ (case studies, webinars, eBooks), and we started seeing really good results… prospects and leads started trickling in and indicating interest in product demos, plus signing up.
Related: Inbound Marketing Guide for B2B Marketers
3. Focused content marketing on an audience that was too small
Our initial strategy was to go after managed IT providers (MSPs). This was a very targeted and niche approach to take, but we knew they loved our product, so wanted to start small.
In most marketing strategies, I recommend going after your target market, and really driving home your message. With content marketing, it doesn’t work as well.
Why? Because content marketing relies on people reading your content, reading your blog posts. Since producing quality content costs money, you need to make sure there are enough eyeballs reading it to make it an ROI positive initiative.
For us, just targeting MSP’s wasn’t giving us any positive ROI. We just weren’t reaching enough eyeballs. Our market was too small, we could only reach them via social media (LinkedIn, Twitter), and weren’t getting any search traffic, because the articles were so niche.
In June, we made a strategic decision to start broadening out our content marketing strategy and go after a slightly different market. No longer were we targeting MSP directors and business owners, now we were targeting any B2B business professional who was experiencing specific problems around customer retention, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Our content focused on solving these core problems. Since the content targeted a bigger audience, our articles started ranking on Google. We now have 60+ posts ranked well on Google for lots of search terms relating to our topics. These organic visitors make up the majority of our traffic. We’ve gone from 500 visits a month to 11,000 a month.
4. Didn’t write content that WOW’d readers
Quality content WOW’s your readers. It’s remarkable, sharable and searchable. The problem a lot of startups have is they don’t write content that WOW’s the reader. That was a problem I had as well.
Initially, when I was ramping up our content marketing efforts, I focused more on pumping out content, than on creating remarkable content. It was more able just getting something out there, as opposed to having a purpose and creating something that added value.
We really didn’t see too much success and never had many shares until I started writing content to WOW readers. To do this, I focused on making the content extremely valuable by using research to backup theories, providing actionable solutions, and using real examples of customers and other companies to help paint a picture. This combined with some ‘story-telling’ helped to turn things around overnight.
Our content went from having a couple of shares, to trending on LinkedIn and driving 100+ shares; resulting in lots of new visitors.
5. Didn’t optimise for search engines
Search engines now cater for 80% of our traffic. They’ll also be a BIG portion of your traffic, so you need to make sure you get this right.
When it comes to SEO, I hate all the tactics out there that try and position this as an art form, that only a few SEO gurus know and they use specific strategies that are hidden secret, blah blah blah.
Coming from working inside an SEO agency, I know the gist’s of what works and what doesn’t. Since the middle of 2012, the SEO game has changed and it’s now not so much about these ‘hidden tactics’. It’s more about creating valuable content that people actually want to read.
So, here are the three things you need to do to make sure your blog posts are SEO optimised
Target a keyword theme, not specific keywords
This means no longer should you target a specific keyword, you should target a general ‘theme’ of keywords. For example, we’ve got a blog post ranking well for ‘customer retention strategies’. We’re not targeting just the keyword, we want traffic from a bunch of related terms… we get plenty of traffic from just ‘customer retention’, and other words like ‘client retention’, ‘how to increase retention’.
Optimise blog titles and URLs
Taking into account your keyword theme, make sure it is in your blog title, URL and first sentence. This is pretty basic stuff, it tells the visitor what you’re going to be addressing in the blog post. I like to write content for people, not search engine. Optimise the content page to tell the visitor what they can expect from your blog post or page.
Remarkable content that is relevant to the keyword
Google tracks bounce rates and devalues your pages if people bounce too quickly. What that means is you need to be making sure that when someone clicks your link on the search results page for ‘customer retention strategies’, you better be giving them a bunch of strategies they can use to increase customer retention. There’s no point giving them anything else. I also recommend linking to additional pieces of content where relevant. So if there is a more detailed overview of something, link off to that page. You want to help the visitor with whatever they are looking for. The last thing you want is them going back to search results!
For any keyword that I want to target, I always do a Google to see what currently is ranking in the top five results. This is a great way to see what visitors (and Google) want from the content. Use this feedback to make sure your content gives them something they want to read, and is obviously better then what is currently ranking!
Related: How to get your content ranked on Google
Focus on content marketing fundamentals and avoid common mistakes
The success or failure of your content strategy will depend on whether you do the fundamentals well. By avoiding these mistakes you can give your content strategy a instant boost and put yourself in a good position to make it a success.
Content marketing doesn’t have to be hard.
I hope that these insights, tips and tricks can help you get more results with your content marketing and bring in more ROI for your company.
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