Content marketing habits are the power source of your creativity. While the good ones are your pillars of strength, the bad ones push you down a negative spiral.
To ensure your content engine has lift off, here are the 5 worst ones to avoid:
5 Content Marketing Mistakes
1. Having A Content Dumping Mindset
The content bubble is inflating faster than ever before. But most of the content on the internet gets no to minimal traction. Why? The pieces are a value subtract and offer nothing substantial.
Don’t add to the landfill of poor content — don’t create for the sake of creating.
Your business needs a blog, and there are many benefits of having one, but it doesn’t need to be ‘just another blog’.
If you want to be known for a particular niche, don’t write any and everything — be a thought leader, share content that makes the reader wander.
2. Only Posting Blog Links
Distribution — the right kind, is the undisputed heavyweight champion that will help you get ahead.
Publishing a blog, sharing it on owned media channels, and in relevant community forums and groups, is only one viable distribution tactic — albeit not a very good one. Community-first, network-first platforms do not want their audience and engagement to head out of their door.
Although the closed-loop circuit of SEO and content distribution helps establish you as an authority in your domain, user tasks that add friction to scrolling are unwelcome.
Post content that engages, that delights, and that leaves your readers asking for more.
3. Hashtag Spamming
Expanding a conversation’s reach to a solution unaware audience is one of the biggest challenge a marketer faces, and hashtags can offer some quick wins.
But no two audience expansion efforts are the same. While generic hashtags offer an extremely broad reach, the demographics may not always be on point. The other downside of using ‘broadcast’ hashtags is the increased competition for attention and eyeballs.
When leveraging hashtags, be deliberate, precise, and focus on using relevant hashtags.
4. Creating Safe Content
Search Engine Optimization warrants extensive keyword coverage — but if you want to be known as a problem solver and not as a dictionary to your industry, stop producing content everyone else is — focus on customer pain-points, and create content that provides unique value.
Write content that answers what the reader is looking for, be the one-stop source to solutions they are looking for, high keyword search volume or not.
5. Not Having A Unique Voice And Opinion
Shifting market trends nudge any and every business to write about topics surrounding that behavior change. For weeks, even months, it seems like that is all anyone can talk about.
Except regurgitating everything already out there works against you. When a reader who has read 5 blog posts on the same topic comes to your article, and from the get-go feels it is the same content, packaged differently, they will bounce off.
Take up unique perspectives that highlight depth of research and breadth of previously not interlinked ideas to present your own analysis of any given topic.
To Conclude
Content creation is a resource-intensive activity — and organizations bank on it to deliver impactful results.
But if your content marketing strategy resembles the mistakes listed above, your competition is mockingly applauding you.
Time to get ahead of the competition.
