Content marketing is critical to raising your brand’s visibility to the right audience. However, there are a number of mistakes—from failing to conduct search optimization to publishing boring content to focusing too heavily on owned content—that can offset your team’s hard work.
Look Left’s Bryan Scanlon and Matt Raven have seen just about every content mistake imaginable. They recently shared the top content strategy mistakes companies make and ways to avoid them in the latest episode of the Look Left @ Marketing podcast.
Conversation highlights include:
- Bryan warns that content, even when educational in nature, can’t be bland: “Boring content is just not good. Keep a few clever things in, have a point of view, take a stand on a few things. It’s not going to kill anybody unless you’re writing for a medical journal or you’re giving instructions on brain surgery.”
- Matt suggests that content that focuses more on a brand’s solution, as opposed to addressing the audience’s challenges, can be ineffective: “Most times big budget numbers and investments are rooted in sales and marketing and qualified leads. ‘How can we generate more leads quarter over quarter, month over month?’ When the (content) focus is there, people tend to over-index on bottom-of-the-funnel, sales-oriented (messaging). In my experience, that may not only limit productivity from a search perspective, but it also could potentially turn your audience off.”
- Matt says that content strategies should focus on a limited number of big ideas that can be repurposed: “Let’s not think of this as writing 500 blog posts this year. Let’s think of it as creating three really great pieces of content that start as whitepapers, then we can repurpose them into six blogs apiece. Then that can be a social campaign, which can feed account-based marketing and go into your email newsletter. By the time you’re all said and done, you’ve created 100 pieces of content from three ideas.”
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