We often use our DigitalSherpa blog as an opportunity to share useful tips to aid you in your content marketing and social media marketing strategies. Since we can all learn something from mistakes made along the way, I personally think the "don't do" tips are just as important and potentially more valuable than the best practice tips that we share. With this in mind, I wanted to take a moment to share three of the worst content marketing mistakes a business can make, and hopefully you will take great care to avoid them as well:
The business that operated with the "create as much content as you can" philosophy. Yes, it is true that the more fresh your content is, the better it will rank with search engines; however, the second part of this equation is the quality of the content. If you are just cranking out new content for the sake of creating content, it can be a detrimental blow to your business's SEO strategy if you are not paying attention to quality. If you can't produce high quality content on a regular basis, consider partnering with a blog and content writing service that can execute this strategy more effectively.
The business that is constantly pushing sales pitches versus giving back value to consumers. Your blog, for example, should not be a walking advertisement for your brand. Instead, it should be considered a trusted resource for your existing and prospective customers to turn to for finding out important industry related information and reading about topics that they find interesting and relevant. Doing so, in turn, will help to position you as an industry expert and help to create a following of loyal customers.
The business that takes the time to write quality content, but neglects to promote it. What is the point of creating content if you're not going to share it with your social networks? As a best practice, include social sharing buttons at the end of each blog post to encourage your readers to share it via social media. If you create an infographic that you think could really benefit your target audience, send out an email blast that features this specific content. Your social followers and subscribers are following you for a reason - they're interested in what you have to say! Just make sure you're not over-promoting content or promoting content that's not relevant to your business!
After reading through these content marketing mistakes, are you finding that you can relate to any of them? Did you make any of the above mistakes? If you did, don't worry! Stop them immediately and start practicing good content marketing moving forward!
(content marketing mistakes / shutterstock)