4 Things You Need to Know About Content Marketing

Not all content marketing tactics are effective. Such as content fatigue, the need to sell, and focusing on yourself versus the buyers are all problems.

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

- Contentmarketinginstitute

As you can read in this quote, the content needs to be valuable, relevant and consistent. Content marketing mistakes are too easy to make. So, the question is how do you avoid them? What can you do instead? This article will give answer on these questions.

TIP 1: Short Term Thinking vs Long Term Thinking

Lots of people are focused on selling first. Of course you want to pad your bottom line. Your business is your living – if you’re not making money you don’t have a business at all.

According to John Waghorn you need to know what your goals are. When you are working on your content marketing campaigns, it’s up to you to decide if you are going to focus on short term, long term, or a mixture of both of these individual goals. 

Examples of short term goals are:

·       Traffic
·       Conversions
·       Engagement

Examples of long term goals are:

·       Community building
·       Link acquisition
·       Exposure

But the problems starts popping up when you forget the main definition of content marketing: “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

It is all about the customer, not about the sales.

Your content needs to be natural and useful. When you build good relationships and you establish authority, the sales come as a result, both the other way around.

Trust is the number one thing you’re trying to build with content, so don’t be a salesman because nobody trusts a salesman.

TIP 2: Self-focus vs Customer Focus

It’s very important to keep in mind that your audience has wants and needs that differ from yours.  

You need to write for them. Or, as David Spark puts it, “The right content for the wrong person might as well be the wrong content." So write about what your audience like, not only what you like. You also can ask your audience what they like to read.

TIP 3: Quality vs Quantity

Sharon Hurley Hall says that a flood of content will work initially, but not over time. You’ll get some traffic, but only at first. When people read your mediocre posts and see that you have hordes of them, you just won’t resonate. They’ll leave your site, and they won’t return.

Having regular, quality posts, is better than posts flood of content. Since we have hit 'peak content', the only way for content marketing to remain effective is to produce far less, but far better content. Janessa Lantz argues that marketers must become more like product managers rather than marketers that are churning out as much content as possible and just want to create the most noise. The idea is to be the lone signal in the noise: to be a really good content writer who writes authoritative and unique pieces of content that your target group is after.

Conclusion of all: quality before quantity. You will annoy people with too much posting on their feeds.

TIP 4: Bad SEO vs Good SEO

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.

Alexander Kesler is telling in his article that it is not that easy to stay on top of the most successful optimization techniques, with many businesses falling into the trap of incorrectly doing SEO. Instead of seeing massive traffic and increasing conversion rates, the results can be quite the opposite.

Two things that are bad for SEO are: keyword stuffing and link stuffing.

Starting with keyword stuffing it actually used to be fairly successful – until search engines wised up to it and began penalizing websites that did it. Today, stuffing a keyword into your content too many times can actually knock the stuffing out of your search rankings, or even cause your content to be removed from search listings entirely.

The second one is link stuffing, it is similarly spammy and unnatural-looking. This is where you link to as many different websites as possible to build your clout. The problem is, it’s transparent what you’re trying to do, and it looks strange.

So if you overdo SEO, you are being underhanded. You’re ignoring quality (we saw that quality is more important than quantity) and readability in favour of getting more traffic.

DON’T FORGET TO…

focus on your audience, authenticity and quality. Genuinely desire a relationship with you readers and your customers. To eventually be the best in content marketing.