While the wisdom “Content is King” is truer today than it ever has been in the past – because there’s an abundance of material on the interwebs competing for your target market’s precious time and attention – it’s also true that not all content is being handled the right way.
Or to put things more bluntly: some otherwise very capable, competent and successful businesses in both the B2C and B2C space are making some major content marketing errors. In our experience, here are the 4 biggest:
1. Not Targeting Each Audience Group
Many businesses are churning out “one-size-fits-all” content that may not be necessarily bad in terms of quality (though it can be sometimes!), but is nevertheless not targeting specific audience groups.
This is a major, fundamental mistake because target audiences want and, frankly, demand to be engaged by relevant, meaningful content that resonates with their challenges, “pain points,” goals, aspirations, and so on. Otherwise, they’ll reject the content because they’ll correctly detect that it’s not meant for them.
2. Lack of Quality
When it comes to content marketing, quantity is always going to be an important factor – but it’s not nearly as vital as quality.
Unfortunately, many businesses that are producing their content in-house aren’t meeting professional quality standards; and it’s usually because their hard working people don’t have the skills, time or technology to consistently produce quality content in an efficient, cost-effective way.
3. Lack of Consistency
We’ve already touched on consistency, but it’s important to explore this further because a huge problem for many businesses.
This is because there are several channels to reach customers, including websites, blogs, articles, newsletters, videos, Infographics…and the growing list goes on. It’s very difficult for businesses to both regularly produce quality content AND maintain a “birds-eye view” of all of their channels, in order to ensure that their content is consistent and integrated across the entire ecosystem.
When this doesn’t happen, the result is an ad hoc approach to content marketing that lacks cohesion – which customers definitely pick up on and find anywhere from annoying to alarming.
4. Lack of Assets and/or Gating
Many businesses undermine their content marketing efforts by not strategically developing and implementing their offers. There are two ways that this problem typically crops up: lack of assets, and lack of gating.
Without creating valuable and desirable assets – such as ebooks, Infographics, Webinars, and so on – businesses don’t have a way to “nudge” their customers forward into a relationship.
And on the other end of the spectrum, some businesses that are in fact creating great assets aren’t “gating” them – i.e. they aren’t gathering a name, email address, and potentially other valuable data in a form in exchange for the asset.
Solving these 4 Major Content Marketing Mistakes
If your business is making one, some or all of these mistakes, then the smartest, simplest and most cost-effective way to solve them is by working with the proven content marketing experts here at Leap Clixx who will:
- Work with you to develop robust, realistic buyer personas for all target audience groups, and then craft both content and delivery strategy accordingly (i.e. channel, frequency, etc.).
- Help you decide what pieces of your content marketing puzzle can be effectively handled in-house, and what pieces should be outsourced so that quality is consistently achieved on all fronts: from the content itself, to the presentation, to the delivery and everything else.
- Ensure that the small details and the big picture of your content marketing plans and campaigns are taken care of; because they both have to work together, or neither of them will.
- Create compelling, desirable assets and deploy them behind strategically-developed forms so that you can know much more about your customers – and engage them accordingly.
To get started, contact us today and schedule your free consultation.
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