As a small business owner, your time and budget are resources as precious as water in a desert. Content marketing mistakes can see them both trickle or even spill away. Avoid the following five common content marketing mistakes to ensure that every minute and penny of your efforts are well-invested, with excellent return on investment.
5 Content Marketing Mistakes Made by Small Businesses
Content marketing is a powerful strategy for small businesses, but certain mistakes can hinder its effectiveness. Here are five common content marketing mistakes made by small businesses:
Mistake 1: Picking Your Topics Without Research
Most small business owners trust their gut when it comes to topic selection. But there are times to trust your gut and times to trust the data.
A little research can tell you exactly what your readers want to click, read, and share. It can tell you the questions they crave to have answered at any given moment, and also the keywords and content that’s more likely to rank in the search engines.
A few simple tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush, for example, can tell you exactly which pieces of content are earning revenue for your competitors. You can then work out how to provide better content, with better backlinks, for those exact same topics and keywords, and quietly proceed to eat their lunch, article by article, post by post.
Mistake 2: Not Targeting Your Content
If you don’t have a clear picture of your target audience, it’s hard to know what’s on their mind. It’s difficult to choose a content topic with confidence. Without defining and targeting the specific band of individuals you’d most like as customers, you don’t know if they’re currently hungry to consume a given topic or if they’re utterly uninterested.
Too many small businesses toss out content like the proverbial Italian chef who throws spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. What’s the result? A lot of wasted spaghetti. Remember, you’re paying for each piece of content, so don’t let it go to waste. Make sure you know precisely who it’s for and why they want to read it. You’ll be 10 times more likely to reap rewards.
Mistake #: Neglecting to Analyze Content Performance
Just as you can learn from your competitors, you can also learn from the performance of your own content. When you crystalize your goals and know your key performance indicators, you can keep precise track of what’s working and what isn’t. You can then put more resources into that which works, and let fizzle away that which doesn’t.
Your objective might be to boost leads, sales, and revenue. Or it might be to grow website traffic, click-through rates, email opens, and shares. Whatever the specific goal of your campaign, be sure to monitor your results closely and tweak often, to gradually crank up your ROI over time.
Mistake 4: Failing to Repurpose Your Content
The effort you put into creating any single piece of content can be leveraged dramatically with strategic repurposing. This means using that same piece of content over and over, in various formats on various platforms, to reach more potential customers. Without repurposing, you’re leaving money on the table with each Tweet, post, and picture.
You might turn an article into an infographic for Instagram or Facebook, for example. You could take out key ideas for a series of Tweets, or go over them in a Youtube video or podcast. All the while you’re enticing the audience to take small steps, moving along a funnel of content toward your website and final call to action.
Mistake 5: Not Building Relationships
Rather than viewing other content creators in your industry as competitors, it helps to see them as potential partners. For that is what they are. The most successful content marketers almost always incorporate an element of influencer marketing into their strategy.
With patience, you can gain the support of the better-established influencers in your market by regularly commenting on their posts, sharing their videos, and linking to their high-quality articles. Over time, they’ll often notice you, get to know you and begin returning the favor. The result is a win-win situation with plenty of shared traffic all around.
Take the time to implement the above five factors into your content marketing campaigns, and you’ll soon see an ROI that makes all your efforts worthwhile.
