Marketing can be a highly complex business operation, and large companies often invest a significant portion of their resources into it. Hence, small businesses—startups in particular—with a fraction of said large corporations’ budget and resources often find marketing highly challenging. You’ll need to stretch your dollar, use content marketing services and avoid these common content marketing mistakes in order to develop a foolproof marketing strategy that will help your business stand out from competitors.
Not Having a Clear Marketing Plan
A marketing plan is an overview of your marketing strategy for a set period, be it monthly, quarterly, or annually. Having a well-defined marketing plan can make sales dramatically easier for any business. It allows you to target your ideal customer or market base, significantly increasing your conversion rate. Your marketing plan should have the following written down:
- Target Customers,
- Strategies to Increase Brand Awareness,
- Approaches to Increase Customer Loyalty,
- Distribution Plan,
- Unique Selling Proposition, and
- Market Projections.
Not having a clear vision and realistic marketing campaign outcomes will severely increase your business’s attrition rate. Thus, if you have a dedicated content marketing team, you need to make sure that your marketing messaging remains consistent as much as possible throughout the entirety of your business operations. In case you don’t know how to manage such a delicate feat, consider hiring a content marketing agency for building brand awareness.
Not Narrowing Down Your Audience
Many small business owners try to market their business to a broad, general audience. It does sound lucrative to do so since it should, ideally, maximize your brand awareness. However, in reality, not only will it be impossible to please everyone. It leads to the exact opposite outcome and overextends your already limited resources towards developing curated marketing content for every social media platform available.
Instead, you should identify your target market base and customers and develop content only for them. You can do this by performing market research of your target customers and which social media platforms are typical for most of them. Remember, most memorable brands tend to do a few things very well rather than casting a broad net, hoping to catch a specific fish.
Only Focusing on One Content Medium
Gone are the days when content marketing only involved direct texted blog posts and a few images. In today’s highly competitive market, you’ll need various content marketing mediums to be successful. Apart from a regularly updated blog, it can also include infographics, video marketing, online ads, eBooks, and your business website. However, you should only choose mediums that compliment your products, services, and target audience.
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Not Having a Call to Action
A call to action is an essential part of your content intended to encourage a viewer or a customer to perform a specific act or feel a certain way that gets them further down the sales funnel. Having an engaging infographic, ad, blog post, or another content medium won’t be successful if it does not contain a call to action that tells your target audience what to do next. Apart from that, they also serve as an opportunity to let your audience know about your brand’s identity, goals, and mission statement.
An efficient call to action should have the following characteristics:
- Campelling.
- First Person.
- Conspicuous.
- Focused on only one action.
However, you should personalize your call to action in a way that reflects the product or business service that your business has to offer.
Ignoring SEO
Every modern business would need an array of online content to promote their brand awareness. However, if you’re not tracking how your customers are engaging with your online materials, you may never know if you need to rethink your marketing strategies. Search engine optimization (SEO) can help you analyze how well your content marketing is doing its job.
The farther down the search page of Google your content is, the less likely it is that someone will find and click on it. SEO is the process of curating your website and its contents to become more visible to users who search for relevant terms on the web. Essentially, it bridges the gap between how you perceive your consumers and how they perceive your business. You can improve SEO rankings by simplifying industry terms and adding relevant keywords to your online content.
Ignorance isn’t a Bliss in Marketing
Today’s market is highly competitive. As a business owner, you cannot afford to make these common content marketing mistakes lest you cede market dominance to your competitors. Ensure that you avoid these errors and construct your content marketing strategies in a way that will engage your target audience the best way it can.
