Content marketing tactics and workarounds that used to rule the world for you, may now have lost their mojo. The recipe of success for modern digital marketers is to keep evolving with this highly dynamic industry and trends.
So what exactly are the mistakes you’re making that you need to leave today if you are to conduct a great content marketing job in a competitive market?
1. Content marketing is to be used for link building
Let’s accept the fact, traditional SEO used to revolve around link building. The old thought-process was, the more links directed to your website, the more good for the business. This is where content marketing stepped in, generating content to catch more links. As for now, the trick has become obsolete. Rather than going for quantity of links, any website’s ranking is depending on a number of other factors including citations, quality of links, and more.
What digital marketers fail to understand is that producing content just for the sake of links eventually dumps you into a lot of issues. Simply speaking, Google is no more impressed by link building, so what exactly does content marketing leads us to?
Experts state the major goals of content marketing are brand awareness and loyalty, customer education and engagement, and talent acquisition. Agreed, there is no presence of traffic and click-through rates in the goals list. What companies should be vigilant for is that promotional links and other fancy buzzwords are there to fool you in bringing traffic to the website, rather they tend to infest spammy content and affect the credibility of the business greatly. Readers are smart and are navigating to your website to devour valuable content, not to read a post that is hell-bent on only acquiring bulk traffic without providing them the content they have come for.
However, it doesn’t mean that traffic should to be neglected, building traffic is appreciable but only if done through the right way. If you acquire quality links, consider it a quality fortune, but never set it your grand goal.
2. More content is better
There used to be a misconception that more the content, more will be your chances to win the content marketing game. However, today the content production has taken over the search volume.
It has been foretold that content marketing is approaching the event horizon, where companies are required to produce exceptionally good content that would acquire them a healthy audience, or else risk getting pulled in the Black Hole of an extremely competitive and overly congested field where worn out and tired customers would demand 10 times more effort in tempting them towards your business.
According to Mark Schaefer, Tao of Twitter author, “Content shock [is] the emerging marketing epoch defined when exponentially increasing volumes of content intersect our limited human capacity to consume it.”
Consider the example of taking part in routine conversations either at home, office, or in any social gathering. How much can stand the constant talking, talking, talking, and some more talking?
Absolutely none. It’s simple, we prefer listening to people who have something literally ‘valuable’ to say, also the way in which we want them to convey their message. The same concept applies in content marketing as well!
The point is rather than going for the bulk, marketers should focus more on quality content. This leads us to the following considerations:
- Quality content may be less, obviously, you can’t expect to write down the best possible posts in no time.
- A quality content has a defined threshold, and after it’s reached, the marketer should look forward to go for new horizons. While the new direction will aim at a completely new thing, not to make the content any better.
- A great content relies heavily on the readers, meaning that it addresses the audience in the most effective way rather than displaying lengthier and thoroughly descriptive chunks with proper grammar and sentence structuring.
3. Create the content, and audience will come
Another major misconception in the digital marketing industry, that creating content is solely enough to capture a healthy audience base. Quite an incomplete fact that marketers should understand, especially taking the ever-increasing difficulty in impressing the audience in a competitive world.
Strictly speaking, the true essence of content marketing comes down to three major things, generating a great content, ensuring it finds its place in the search engines, and marketing it to your target audience through the most potent channels.
Any content marketing strategy is bound to face a painful death if there hasn’t been ample marketing to promote the content.
So the next time someone’s says, “I create the content, and the audience will come”, ask them to tweak their sentence to, “I create the content, promote it appropriately, and the audience will come”.
4. Blogging is the best channel for content marketing
One of the most common, yet crucial misconception is people take content marketing as ‘blogging’. What people should understand is that content marketing is something more than just creating a blog and uploading content on regular basis. Yes, it would be more honest to say that blogging is one of the components that crafts a powerful and full-fledged content marketing strategy.
On the other hand, there are a plethora of content marketing types that can survive with or without a blog such as videos, guides, infographics, eBooks, whitepapers, podcasts, webinars, live chats, and much more.
Agreeably, you can dig huge success from blogging, but it’s also true that blogging is not the right choice for every kind of business. In fact, it is also stated that some businesses should not opt blogging for their content marketing endeavors.
For instance, let’s take a niche industry that we do not talk about every day, drilling equipment for industrial recycling. The professionals in this particular expertise may not be much into browsing through the web to read articles on related topics. Even if there originates a blog covering the mechanics, uses, types and other relevant details of the drilling equipment, how much traffic do you think would it be able to attract, let alone registering a considerable ROI for the business. However, this particularly exclusive category may fare well using content marketing strategies on LinkedIn, a platform where professionals from such industries can be found.
So how do we find out which content marketing strategy can become the best fit for our business? You need to locate your right audience, and inquire what forms of content can reach them most strongly.
5. Content is enough
Let’s take the phase ‘content marketing’, it might trick someone into believing that content is marketing in itself. The professionals should see that at least one content chunk is a pure call-to-action, in order to make sure content marketing is aligned with your business goals as intended.
We’re not here plunging in the depths of CTAs, just a quick refresher that these action tools are the real game changer and can be powerful enough to lead healthy conversions.
However, never get mistaken with the fact that your content is a sales pitch tool. Rather appropriate CTAs can be incorporated, only if necessary. Even then the content can be drilled with enough potential to generate leads. The concluding point is, content and marketing runs hand-in-hand, and should support each other.
If you’re encountering difficulties in content marketing, do note that not mentioning your offerings, services, distinct features, etc. won’t acquire you the ROI your brand so rightfully deserves.
Final Thoughts
We all need to acknowledge that the landscape of digital industry, more particularly content marketing is changing. A countless number of businesses can be seen doing content marketing in some way or other. But the concern here is, how are you approaching it? If you’re making any of the above mistakes, then it’s about time you reconsider your content marketing strategy if you want to obtain healthy conversions, and eventual revenues for your business.
Author Bio
Allison Blair is an entrepreneur, corporate trainer, and an accomplished digital marketing specialist having the experience of working with some of the best online brands worldwide like Dissertation Help Squad. Besides her regular job and passion in content marketing, Allison Blair is also the most reliable answer to students’ biggest concern, “can someone write my assignment?” catering a number of academic disciplines.
