Content marketing, though not a brand new concept, is still plenty new to many organizations. If yours is one of them, you’ve discovered that it’s very different from the old approach of force-feeding benefit-bloated brochures to an audience with little or no appetite for them. It’s a much more nuanced skill, and one where it’s easy to make missteps in the early going.
To help you find your footing, here are some common content marketing mistakes that newbies make and how to avoid them.
- Biting off more than you can chew. Content marketing (also known as inbound marketing) has such huge potential for an organization that it’s hard NOT to get amped up about it. And that energy can very easily push you into more projects and onto more platforms than you can possibly handle. Yes, you want to ultimately have a large library of content. And, yes, you ultimately want to be sharing your content over many channels (email, social, website, etc.). But in both of the prior sentences, the key is “ultimately.” Try to have it all immediately and the quality of your content and your efforts in general will suffer. To avoid this mistake, set reasonable goals both for content creation and channel adoption, and stick to them.
- Failure to make use of what you already have. Even before you began practicing content marketing, you had content. You just may not have thought of it that way. If you fail to take advantage of the pieces you’ve already created, you are wasting valuable time and energy. Avoid this by performing a content inventory as your very first step into the world of inbound marketing. Find and document anything and everything that falls under a very broad definition of “content.”
- Failure to consult with stakeholders about content. You’ve researched content marketing, you’ve purchased an inbound marketing system (HubSpot, for example), you’ve received the green light from upper management… it’s time to go to town on some content creation! Hold on. Before you start creating pieces that you are sure will be of interest to your target personas, you better get a second opinion. Other departments (Sales, Support, etc.) may have some very valuable input for you. Avoid the “we got this” mistake by seeking input from anyone in your organization that interacts with prospects or customers.
- Having no measurable goals. The only way to do a better job of content marketing tomorrow is to understand what you did well (and poorly) today. And yesterday, and the day before. Inbound marketing is a very iterative process. You try something. You measure. You revise and try again. Be sure that one of the first actions you take in your content marketing program is to set some realistic and measurable goals.
- Failure to have a blog. There are a number of reasons that companies (and especially their executives) are often opposed to blogging. Keeping a blog active requires a commitment of resources, many blogs out there rarely (if ever) put out anything of value, etc. However, successful content marketing programs almost always include a blog. Avoid this mistake by 1) convincing management that a blog is a necessity, and 2) developing a strategy for creating substantive blog posts on a regular basis.
As a leading Colorado Springs inbound marketing agency, we’ve helped clients here, in Denver, and throughout the state skip right past the beginner blunders that companies so often make and get up to speed quickly with their content marketing programs. How can we help you do the same? Let’s talk.
