Done right, content marketing is a powerful brand-building strategy. It can establish you as an authority in your field, increase brand recognition and trust, and deliver a strong return on investment (ROI). Great content marketing positions you for long-term growth by helping you earn more leads and encourage repeat purchases.
Of course, success isn’t a given. Content marketing requires multiple types of strategic and technical expertise. Even experienced marketers can make mistakes, the costs of which can range from missed ranking opportunities to thousands of dollars in content creation efforts down the drain.
Here’s an overview of six common content marketing mistakes, paired with tips on how to avoid or overcome them and keep your team on track.
6 content marketing mistakes to avoid
- Making too much okay content and too little great content
- Putting content creation before content strategy
- Neglecting existing content
- Gating too much valuable content
- Misapplying search engine optimization (SEO) practices
- Overlooking your distribution strategy
Content marketing can help you earn more leads, boost sales, and increase retention rates. However, mistakes can be costly. Help your marketing team avoid these six content marketing mistakes:
1. Making too much OK content and too little great content
Underestimating the value of excellent work contributes to many common content marketing mistakes. You may find yourself emphasizing volume over quality and being unwilling to invest the resources that compelling content requires.
Truly great content provides audiences with something they need and can’t find anywhere else, whether that’s expert insights into the best yarn choice for a crochet lace birdcage veil or a comprehensive guide to handbag styles. Most of what you encounter each day probably doesn’t meet those standards, and it takes effort not to mimic what you see.
Train yourself to aim higher by habitually looking out for work that’s a cut above the rest. When you find something valuable, save it for future reference. You’ll sharpen your critical sensibilities and develop an eye for quality that you can apply to your own work. Over time, you’ll also curate a collection of top-notch examples. You can analyze pieces to learn how different brands deliver unique value to audiences and explore the potential of analogous approaches for your company.
2. Putting content creation before content strategy
It would be a mistake to underestimate the difficulty of maintaining strategic focus in the contemporary digital environment. The pressure to pivot with every new marketing channel or content trend is real. If a thought like “we should be making short-form videos” has ever popped into your head unattached to any notion of why video belongs in your content strategy, you’ve experienced it already. Teams that give in end up stretched thin by content creation deadlines that don’t support their long-term business objectives.
To avoid this common content mistake, decide how and when you’ll update your content marketing strategy. You might schedule quarterly full-team planning meetings that include a review of performance data, an update on developments in the content landscape, and consideration of content-related proposals, for example. Creating a structure for change encourages you to test new ideas for alignment with long-term business goals, invites input from your team, and makes your content marketing efforts more flexible and consistent.
3. Neglecting existing content
It can be tempting to focus all of your efforts on creating new content. Maybe you want to be the first footwear company to discuss AI shoe sizing or weigh in on every new fashion aesthetic on Instagram. The problem with viewing your content marketing department as a bakery responsible for fresh items daily is that it favors increasingly short trend cycles over your unique perspective. Instead, think of your pieces as players on a football team and your content managers as coaches. Signing new recruits adds a lot of value, but so does developing your proven stars.
Balance content creation with efforts that surface top-notch content from your archives so you can repurpose content across platforms and rework it into new formats. A blog post could make a great infographic, for example, and a case study could turn into a series of data-rich social media posts. You can also improve content while retaining its format. Imagine that you sell table bases, and you already have a high-performing blog post titled “How to choose a base for a marble table,” an evergreen search query in which you’ve continued to build expertise. To expand the piece, you might create graphics, add new insights, and break it into four distinct sections, each one with a bulleted list of considerations.
Best practices also include improving or discarding low-quality content. Use performance insights to focus your existing content efforts, prioritizing conversion rate optimization for high-performing pieces and increasing quality and relevance for low-performing content. Even archived content represents your brand, so do a content audit and refine, repurpose, and cull on an ongoing basis.
4. Gating too much valuable content
Creating gated content can be an effective lead generation strategy, as it can encourage customers to take a desirable action. They might submit their contact information in exchange for a high-value asset, such as an ebook, white paper, or free trial. The problem is that customers are inundated with requests from brands for their personal information. Many may be unwilling to share it without proof that you’re offering something worthwhile.
Free content can be how you prove your value, so don’t be afraid to give away brand insights. Imagine two companies, both of which sell online master classes in equine massage therapy. Both businesses create content that capitalizes on relevant search engine optimization (SEO) opportunities, answering search queries like “how to massage a horse,” “how to fix sore back in horse,” and “horse shoulder stretches.”
The first business publishes blogs and video clips that discuss the importance of each subject and then invites you to submit your email to access its patented six-step process. Meanwhile, the second business provides in-depth, helpful answers to each question, complete with free videos you can use to address the issue on your own. It also includes a call to action (CTA) for each piece that invites you to sign up for its email marketing newsletter to learn more.
Which business do you trust more? Which would you pay for a course? Likely the second company. This reflects the idea that gating all of your most valuable content, or the content that showcases your unique perspective, gives audiences no reason to trust you—and it’s a common content marketing mistake. Even worse, audiences can feel misled if, in response to a query, a search engine surfaces content that withholds all helpful information.
Instead, many successful content marketing campaigns give away a massive amount of valuable information for free. Rather than obviating the need to convert, this strategy helps businesses prove their value and earn goodwill, encouraging word-of-mouth marketing and building a loyal customer base.
5. Misapplying SEO practices
SEO and content marketing go hand in hand. SEO techniques help your ideal customers find relevant content from your brand, and quality content increases the value of the site traffic your SEO strategy generates.
This partnership is also a common source of content marketing mistakes. There are well-known ranking factors like Google’s EEAT (experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) guidelines that are designed to reward content that serves audiences. However, marketers still experience tension between the imperative to create content for audiences and the need to perform well in search engine rankings.
One common mistake is adopting an all-or-nothing approach to incorporating SEO into your content marketing efforts—either letting SEO overtake your content calendar or ignoring it completely. The first option has a flattening effect on your business’s content, allowing what others have written about a subject to dictate the topics you cover and what you say about them. Your business’s unique value proposition is unlikely to appear as a recommended keyword, so responding to search volume alone prevents you from differentiating your business.
Not optimizing your content for search engines at all is another common content marketing mistake. Businesses that don’t optimize for SEO can fail to attract the right audiences and miss out on the chance to learn from SEO insights. After all, high-quality content is less valuable to your brand if it’s not garnering any views.
A good strategy lies between these two poles, using an understanding of the search landscape to decide the best way to communicate what makes your brand unique. Done correctly, an SEO strategy can improve your understanding of your target audience, helping you uncover new pain points and identify gaps in your content strategy.
6. Overlooking your distribution strategy
Creating high-quality content is a lot of work. It’s easy to get so focused on developing a content strategy and planning your content calendar that you forget to be strategic about where you publish.
A good distribution strategy factors in where your target audience consumes content, what they do on each publication channel, and how they respond to different content formats and types. It can also involve targeting different audience segments on different channels. You might target younger audiences with video clips on social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat and professional audiences with email marketing and long-form content posted to your website and LinkedIn, for example.
Additionally, use performance data for your past content to determine the best days and times to publish. For example, maybe you learn that your blog posts garner more clicks or comments when you publish and promote them on Monday mornings versus Monday afternoons.
Content marketing mistakes FAQ
What is the 70-20-10 rule in content marketing?
The 70-20-10 rule is a guideline designed to help businesses avoid the common social media marketing mistake of focusing on self-promotion over audience needs. It specifies that 70% of a business’s posts should contain educational or entertaining original content, 20% should share content originally published by somebody else, and only 10% should directly promote the business.
What are the 7 A’s of content marketing?
The 7A framework for content marketing includes the following areas of focus: agility, authenticity, attention, audience, authority, action, and association. By paying attention to each of these elements, a brand can better ensure it is creating content that will be valuable to its target audience.
What are the 4 C’s of content marketing?
The four C’s of content marketing are clarity, credibility, consistency, and competitiveness. The idea is that a brand should focus on these four pillars to drive consumer engagement and conversions.
