12 mistakes explaining why your content marketing strategy doesn’t work

4/14/2023

You’re looking at your competitor’s fanpage posts, blog posts, web content then sigh because your posts are not as good as theirs.

You’re confident that your writing is even better than any other competitors’. But somehow what you write can’t earn the same success as their content.

You wonder why your content marketing strategy just doesn’t work for you.

You’re not alone. Many people are facing the same problems. They are struggling to figure out how to improve their content marketing strategy.

But slow down and once again look at each content piece. You may be getting stuck into 12 content marketing mistakes below.

1. No plan, no gain

The first and obvious content marketing problem is it’s lack of a specific plan.

Businesses that have short-term content plans will know what they’re carrying out weekly, monthly content.

However, many content marketers, especially newbies, forget to plan a content plan for the whole week, but start to draw new topics daily.

That means they’re in a hurry to write to update new content in time without knowing whether it’s practical.

This not only makes you soon run out of ideas, but in the long run it also affects the general marketing activities because, without planning, you can’t determine where and how you will go.

Look at how your competitors are doing, analyze what their activities are then mimic them. It’s the best way to help you improve your content performance.

10 common mistake in making video you must avoid

Businesses that have a clear content strategy gain better results

2. You have no idea of your audience

Not understanding your readers or customers is one of the biggest mistakes in content marketing.

If you don’t take the time to research and understand your audience, how could you know what they like, or what catches their attention?

Also, don’t expect everyone who reads your article to become your buyers.

Sometimes they visit your blog, fanpage to find helpful information. It’s your job to provide everything that’s relevant to both the buyers and the readers.

However, the content you write should still depend on the goals you want to achieve.

Write informational blog posts, educational content to push the audience down the selling funnel is what you need to do.

A lot of content marketers write without defining who they are targeting. They don’t know what their audience is doing. How old they are, what they want.

Therefore, their content marketing strategy may not interest their target readers.

Having no idea of your target audience, you can’t touch their pain points.

Vague content doesn’t solve the difficulties that your audience face. So, it’s impossible to hit their mentality to turn them into buyers.

This is the biggest mistake many newbies encounter. They don’t understand their target audience – which is a key building engaging content marketing strategy.

For example, suppose you have a fanpage selling facial skin care products, instead of only focusing on writing about products. In that case, you should also promote informational content that helps to solve the audience’s skin problem.

Ask yourself questions about your audience before writing:

What are their ages?
What are their careers?
How is their financial status?
What are their education levels?
What are their hobbies?
What are their pain points?

To truly understand your audience, you can conduct short surveys with them.

Determine your audience is a factor in achieving success

3. Wrong purpose content

Many content creators fall into the trap of getting away from their content purpose (for example, instead of writing content that provides wellness advice, they fall back into promoting products, discounts).

You should remember that your content writing aims to always deliver reasonable expert advice related to your products, service.

Before writing, you should build a concrete outline of what you’re going to write to help you develop ideas based on that framework, without getting caught up in irrelevant details.

4. Content is boring

One of the signs showing that your content is boring or ineffective is that it’s not being shared or read. To successfully create good content, you need to make it enjoyable.

Whether it’s cosmetics or beauty, e-commerce or information technology, it needs to be interesting no matter what you write about.

However, interesting content is only a part of effective content because it needs to inspire the community. Viral content offering opposing views, or triggering a discussion can be a good choice to expand.

There are several reasons why you create boring content:

You hire an inexpensive or inexperienced writer.
You don’t know what kind of content you should grow.
Your content is flat-out boring.
You don’t understand your target audience.

The content marketing world is more and more competitive, and great content is more important than ever.

High-quality content can make the difference between successful and unsuccessful content marketing.

Therefore, you must carefully consider developing a specific content marketing topic on social media or blog, website.

Boring content will kill everything

5. Unprofessional content

Professional content needs to be grammatically correct, clear, and valid. It should convey interesting, engaging, and meaningful information to the audience.

Hiring an advertising agency or PR agency is not always a solution to improve content quality unless they have specific content writing training.

Instead, you can hire a content marketer who knows the industry, service, or product you’re offering. He/she will know what to do, and you can save money as well.

Never make unprofessional content

6. Not regularly posting

The main goal of content marketing is to provide your readers and potential customers with helpful information, knowledge. To keep your content fresh and maintain your audience’s loyalty, it’s important to publish and consistently regularly.

If you don’t have a detailed schedule to write and post, or only randomly post whenever you want (sometimes once a week, sometimes every few weeks…), readers will stop accessing your website.

Specific post times is a way to keep your audience interaction. However, remember to ensure quality content. Even if you commit to the schedule, your content is worthless; no one wants to keep reading your posts.

In addition, Google today prioritizes helpful and thorough content instead of cramming keyword content. Therefore, creating quality content is the only way to boost ranks on Google.

7. Say no to SEO

One of many reasons for improving article ranking on Google search page, is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO will bring what you write to the world.

If your content marketing strategy doesn’t correctly incorporate the latest SEO techniques, it might cause problems.

However, some businesses don’t acknowledge SEO’s role, which sometimes leads to low engagement content, even though it’s well written.

You should consider hiring a good SEO expert to advise you on how to choose the topic; how to write the most practical and best SEO content.

8. Think mistakenly

You can write good marketing if you’re good at literature. This is not entirely wrong. A good writer means they have a rich vocabulary and flexible word use, and can coherently, clearly arrange sentences to make it easy-to-read.

However, don’t mistakenly think that if you write well, have 3 or 4 books published, you can write great marketing content. This is a completely wrong attitude.

A good content marketer may not get a high score in literature, he/she might have no books, but their marketing content still attracts the target audience.

The reason is they well know their readers. They know what their audience is looking for, which words can hit audience’ emotions. They’re good at capturing their customers’ pain points, skillfully provoking it, and providing a particular approach to help their readers manage that problem.

For example, you’re a good novelist, and you think that means you can be a great content marketer. Then, you need to reflect and see whether your content attracts the target audience. Does it have good engagement? Are there many comments, shares?

If you can guarantee this, don’t be overconfident.

Writing content marketing means you are serving regular audience targets, they are having problems, having demands, but they haven’t found a way to solve it. And you’re here to prove to them that you’re the best choice, you’re willing to help them.

Your audience won’t want to read your posts if they give them no value, no matter how romantic or flattering your content is.

Don’t be mistaken. You might not as great as you think

9. Don’t care about the audience

As mentioned above, it’s essential to understand your target audience to boost up your content.

However, many content writers don’t understand this. They only write what serves their needs, regardless of whether their audience is interested in their content.

No one wants to read untouchable, non-emotional articles.

If you properly do content marketing, let go of your ego to understand others. Don’t think that writing skill only is enough because if you can’t touch the audience’s emotion, your content fails anyway.

10. No CTA

CTA or Call To Action is an incentive to motivate your audience to take immediate action. Good content marketing without a call-to-action can’t result in any good marketing result.

Without calling to action, your audience doesn’t know what they need to do next.

Many newbies content writers only focus on developing good content, but forget a call to action. This wastes your time, loses audience direction and reduces conversions.

Each content piece should have a purpose and CTA. Whether it’s to get a service quote or give readers a chance to receive a free sample.

Consider placing a CTA:

On your blog
In your email
On your Facebook page
On every page of your website
In your e-books and webinars

Make a call-to-action to motivate your audience to do an action

11. Don’t reuse content

If you’ve been creating content for a while, you might publish a ton of content covering various topics.

And what’s interesting here is that you can reuse that content.

Considering those content reuse ideas:

If you have a report, break it into several different blog posts, or social media content.

Create a video or slideshow from your tutorials

Convert audio recordings and video documents to text format

Share evergreen, popular content with new members in your target audience group.

12. Ignore data analysis

Measuring metrics is one of the must-do activities in content marketing.

Ignoring metrics, you won’t know how effective your content campaign is, whether it’s successful.

Don’t think that you only need to measure 1 or 2 indicators. You have to rely on many figures to evaluate your content plan’s outcome.

You should track website traffic, SEO rankings, social shares to know whether your content is doing well or not.

The metrics you choose to determine success depending on your content marketing strategy, channels you use to promote your content, measurable numbers.

For example, you create a content marketing campaign to promote sale products; your goal is making customers buy those products. Then, you can rely on the number of comments, messages you receive to evaluate your campaign.

There are many reasons people fail in content marketing, but it’s okay to fix it once you understand the problem.

One of the critical aspects you must put on top after reading this article is having a specific content marketing strategy.

Content marketing has become an important factor to many businesses and individuals, and you need to see it as a core value to promote your business.

It’s not about writing a post and inserting it into WordPress only. That’s half the battle.

Content marketing is a long and frustrating journey, as it can’t deliver results within a day or two.

Many businesses and individuals give up because they are too impatient to see the results.

However, content marketing is a sustainable strategy to maintain your audience loyalty, and grow more “fans”.

Instead of investing in long-term and unsustainable campaigns, content marketing is a safe solution you should consider.

Analyze metrics to measure your content marketing outcome

Start analyzing your target audience and building a content marketing strategy first. By doing these two factors well, you will surely achieve your goal as expected later.

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