5 Content Marketing Mistakes ruining your Strategy

Content Marketing.

Content marketing, isn't it so great? It's that good that it costs 62% less than traditional marketing. But wait, there's more!

The benefits of content marketing are endless; among some, we can outline the following:

• It Generates 3x more leads than traditional marketing and 6x more conversions for business that use it.
• Content marketing experts have experienced  7.8% higher annual growth than their followers.
• 82% of marketers that blog sees a higher ROI from inbound marketing.

Due to its good results, almost 88% of B2B marketers use this strategy for their business. Within a high-demand digital world, creating content is one of the best ways to stay relevant as a brand. The internet democratized content and gave a voice to each user within the platforms, so it becomes a top need to create content that stands out.

As a brand, you can no longer offer a product or service only. Today it's necessary to expand your brand experience to a series of content pieces that show your expertise in your niche or the benefits of your product. However, many businesses struggle with what kind of content they can produce or how they should share it, and that is where we come to help you. So sit back and look at these mistakes that could mess up your strategy and how you can get around them.

Let's see!

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Create generic content without giving your brand's point of view.

58% of marketers rank original written content as one of the most important formats.

Nevertheless, we often see similar directions when looking for tips or advice on the internet, regardless of the niche.

• Know your target audience.
• Use SEO tactics.
• EmailMarketing.
• Create a plan.
• Study your analytics

We aren't trying to say that these tips are ineffective, but the problem is that this is basic marketing, and your audience needs something else. When people come to your blog looking for answers, they don't want to see the same essential marketing advice they've already seen everywhere. They need something new, a particular point of view that expands their knowledge and doesn't stay in the basics of this area of expertise. When they find this valuable and unique content in your blog or videos, they'll attend more to you to find helpful content.

For this, the best you can use is your own experience as a brand and teach and talk about the issues from how you have experienced it as a business.

Your notions are probably similar to those of many brands. Still, we are sure that as an independent business, all experiences are different, and everyone can contribute secret knowledge that answers those doubts of your audience.

Content Marketing Mistakes.

Stay in a single format.

With social networks, you have endless content formats that you can exploit, so why stick with just one?

Going hand in hand with the previous tip, we value blogs' effectiveness and other written content. Despite this, you must open your eyes to endless formats that are just as effective and even more popular.

Here we mention some that you can take advantage of.

Infographics.

Infographics are effective in explaining complex topics in a single image. In this way, you can vary those blogs with too many words, adding infographics that save a lengthy explanation in an image that shows everything in a summarized way. The popularity of this format has been so great that its usage grew from 9% to 52%.

Source: YouTube.

Video content.

Did you know that the second most used search engine is YouTube? 

Even today, TikTok is used more as a search engine to search for quick and concise answers in the form of videos. Therefore, you lose a huge audience if you don't make audiovisual content. 

Video content is wonderful because it saves consumers all the work of having to read; it's all an automatic learning experience. The videos don't have to be long since videos of 15 seconds to one minute have achieved great popularity on the platforms mentioned above. When creating this type of content, the idea is to achieve a hook within the first few seconds that makes you want to watch it to the end. 

The popularity of this format is such that a Cisco report confirms that 82% of global internet traffic has come from video streaming or video downloads.

Podcasts.

Podcasts are a format that has gained much popularity within traditional platforms such as YouTube and even applications dedicated only to audio, such as Spotify or Apple Podcasts. The versatility of this format allows you to present it with both video and audio only.

According to the latest studies, there are around 424 million podcast listeners worldwide, but the most striking thing about these statistics is that 38% have bought a product mentioned in them.

Although comedy podcasts are the most popular, that doesn't mean that there cannot be one for your specific niche; no matter how sectored or particular it is, believe us that there will be an audience for it.

The appeal of podcasts is that they allow experts on specific topics to give their opinion more freely on essential issues, and if you have a good fan base, you can be sure that everyone will want to hear what you have to say about them.

The good thing about having different formats is that you can reuse the content, which allows you to take full advantage of the marketing pieces that cost you so much effort to produce. This way, a blog can become a video that expands more in its explanation, or news of interest can become a debate within a podcast.

In case you want more content ideas, here are a few you can try:

•  Whitepapers
•  How To Guides
•  Checklists
•  Short rants
•  Webinars
•  Short-form videos (e.g. Vine)
•  Longer form videos (e.g. YouTube)
•  Memes 
•  Case Studies
•  GIFs 
•  Animations 

Content Marketing Ideas.

Ignore the user-generated content.

This type of content is a goldmine for any business, as users do the work for you to create and share videos, photos and even reviews for your brand, and you don't pay anything for it.

In a study from Reevoo, we found that 70% of people trust images or videos from consumers like them more than what we do with our brands. 

It seems intuitive. As brands, we'll say that our products and services are the best. It's our job to create a good reputation for ourselves, but customers can only judge our quality. So, by taking advantage of any user-generated content that says wonders about our brand, we should at least reach those happy customers with a dm or even repost their content on stories or our social media feed.

But what happens if that content is a bad review? 

Well, either we try to reach that unhappy customer to solve their problem or if there's anything we can do about their disappointment, try to learn from that mistake and keep forward. The idea with bad reviews isn't to panic and think it's the end of the world, instead, when we try to solve it, people will perceive your brand as an entity that cares for their clients to have a good experience and that adds more points to your online reputation.

There are other ways to generate this type of content. Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms offer surveys or any different interactive range that lets users enter your brand's conversation. This tactic is excellent for creating a whole community with your content marketing.

Forgetting to Proofread.

Proofreading is a crucial aspect of verifying that your content is on point. 

You see, the copywriters will be in charge of writing everything and structuring both the articles and the posts for your social networks well, but like any human being, they aren't exempt from making mistakes. For example, confusing "they're" with "their" or not differentiating when they use "it's" with "its" are one of the most common typos that can happen. For this, you can also get the help of free software such as Grammarly, which will help them correct these errors in time and even restructure and rewrite them if you buy the paid version.

The idea is that before any post, the help of a proofreader is essential since, with a calmer mind, they will be able to detect any errors in structure or grammar so that your copy article reaches your audience in optimal conditions.

Proofreading.

Not updating old content.

Have you ever heard of evergreen content? They are pieces of information that do not lose relevance no matter how much time passes. For example, a news blog will provide content that will lose relevance over time since what is important is what happens daily. But, when we talk about digital marketing content, for example, tips on social networks or how to start using SEO tactics, the content will maintain relevance as long as these two are valuable digital marketing strategies.

What happens with our niche, for example? All these techniques evolve rapidly; therefore, the best we can do is update all these to push the content again.

So, in a way, you can see blogging as a long-term investment, ensuring you visitors and customers while keeping them updated with what's happening. That is priceless marketing!

Final thoughts.

No matter how much evidence of how effective content marketing is, if you don't stop making these small mistakes, your final results will not be what you expected. For that, the best we can do is keep learning as we go and apply changes where necessary to achieve new professional goals within our business. At Codedesign, we seek to offer weekly content on different topics to keep you up to date with practical tactics that drive your brand to new levels. 

Feel free to contact us to see the unprecedented growth of your business.

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