The 5 Mistakes That Plague Your Content Marketing

More and more companies are producing web content. Content marketing makes it possible to acquire traffic, generate leads, boost sales and develop notoriety. Performances that have the advantage of being sustainable. Published content forms an irremovable “base” whose effectiveness tends to increase over time. But be careful, because not everything is rosy in the world of content marketing! 

A company can benefit from this. But also to crash because of banal blunders, easily avoidable. That’s the whole point of this article: to take stock of the 5 errors that can lead to your content strategy.

You Haven’t Come Up With A Real Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is a strategy in its own right. To reap the rewards, it’s not enough to publish anything and everything, when it sings to you, without taking into account the needs of your readers and your business goals. A good strategy helps to give a framework to your content production, with:

• an initial intention;
• a goal to be achieved;
• and the means to achieve this (formats, writing style, editorial line, dissemination levers, etc.).

It’s simple: in 2020, 69% of companies that achieve their goals with B2B content marketing rely on a documented strategy (this is 4% more than in 2019 and 7% more than in 2018). In B2C, 71% of companies have a well-established content strategy (documented or not), and another 20% intend to develop one in the coming year.

Your Content Generates Traffic, But Not Necessarily Qualified

Your company’s website has grown from 1,000 to 25,000 visitors in a few months, thanks to the blog you’ve set up and fed with regularity. But at the same time, your conversion rate hasn’t moved an inch. Does this mean that your content marketing strategy is not proven? No, it’s just that the volume of visitors is an indicator that doesn’t make sense as such, if those internet users don’t convert into leads or customers.

At issue: inadequate targeting of readers. To produce results, content must be written with a specific audience in mind. Otherwise, your strategy is to cast a random net into the sea hoping to catch the right fish. For example, a blog dedicated to used cars may well be followed by 100,000 followers. But if half of these visitors don’t even have a driver’s license, these are important resources thrown out the window. The ideal would be to attract 50,000 readers every month. But only licensed motorists are likely to change vehicles in the following months. That is qualified traffic.

Good targeting requires knowing your prospects at your fingertips. By starting by establishing personas, then writing content that responds to their problems. You can, for example, write for “CFOs in service companies with more than 1,000 employees”. It is also a question of optimizing this content so that it is visible to relevant Internet users. That is, so that they appear in search engine results when users type specific queries.

You Don’t Post Enough 

In content marketing, quality comes before quantity. However, attracting (and retaining) the attention of Internet users requires publishing often, in order to retain your audience and bring them back at regular intervals. The goal of the game, with a blog, is to build a foundation of trust and make sure that your audiences see in your company an indisputable expert in its field, a player in the market that can be trusted. This trust cannot be built with a simple monthly article!

Frequency also matters to search engines, which are sensitive to the authority that results from consistent expertise, as well as to the volume of traffic generated. The equation is simple:

• the more content you publish;
• the more traffic you attract;
• and the more Google will judge that these contents are the ones that Internet users want to read, the better your pages will be positioned in the results.

What is the correct frequency of publication? For HubSpot, it all depends on the target goal. To generate organic traffic, you need to post 3 or 4 times a week for a small business. And up to 5 times for a large company. To develop notoriety, it is necessary to publish between 1 and 4 articles per week.

Be careful not to fall into the opposite extreme! The best is sometimes the enemy of the good, even as part of a content marketing strategy. By publishing every day, at all costs, at the risk of having nothing interesting to say or cutting back on quality, you risk alienating part of your readership. It is therefore necessary to find the right balance, and do not hesitate to vary the formats, styles and types of content (hot and cold, for example) so as not to tire your audience.

You’re Streaming Content That Isn’t Of Interest To Your Audiences

Content production is an integral part of inbound marketing strategies, characterized by their “customer-centric” approach. In short: no question of selling through content, but of informing. Of course, it’s ultimately about drawing attention to your business/brand and pushing prospects to convert into customers. But content marketing is not a form of commercial canvassing and cannot consist of talking only about yourself. On the contrary: your content must address your audiences and seek to interest them by evoking their issues, needs and expectations.

It must be understood that consumers tend to reject purely commercial discourse, and that they like to carry out their research on their own.

As can be seen from this graph, 60% of buyers contact a sales representative when they are in the consideration phase, and 20% in the decision phase. This does not leave much room for the discovery phase – dedicated to the search for information. It is therefore necessary to take advantage of this first phase to interest them in your company, through specifically studied content, likely to interest them. This does not prevent you from talking about your brand, for example from a brand content perspective. But this approach is best suited for brands that are well established in the landscape.

You Do Not (Sufficiently) Promote Your Content

To be read, content must exist on the web. So there is no viable content marketing strategy without effective delivery channels, and without active promotion. You should not be satisfied with a tweet to signal the publication of a new post on your blog: you must take advantage of a maximum of channels, such as emailing, social networks, forums, influencers, your own website .

The effectiveness of each channel depends in part on your positioning, B2B or B2C.

Another form of promotion is the optimization of your content. You should know that search engines generate 10 times more traffic than any other acquisition lever. This involves integrating the SEO approach into your content strategy.

Too many companies still create and publish content that remains ignored by Internet users and that does not allow them to make their content marketing campaign profitable, because of common – and easily avoidable – mistakes. Don’t wait to take matters into your own hands!