Content Marketing
11 Content Marketing Mistakes + Best Practices to Avoid Them
To be successful, your content strategy must avoid common mistakes. Learn about 11 content marketing mistakes and best practices to avoid them.
Content marketing is a strategy that builds your brand presence over time through customer relationships fostered by the valuable and relevant content you share.
Turning readers and viewers into customers is a primary focus of content marketing, along with building brand awareness — to be successful, your content and strategy must avoid some common pitfalls.
Let’s review 11 content marketing mistakes and best practices to avoid them.
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The most common content marketing mistake is not grasping or considering its true purpose.
By breaking down the definition of content marketing into individual parts, we can learn a lot about what it is and isn’t.
Content marketing:
Content marketing isn’t the same as outbound marketing or direct advertising.
It is a customer-focused, inbound marketing strategy that builds connection and loyalty through engagement and valuable content.
Keeping this in mind helps to avoid many of these other common content marketing mistakes.
Content marketing speaks to a targeted audience that is clearly defined.
If you don’t know who you are trying to reach, you can’t research and understand what they are looking for.
Rather than focusing on a generic message, your content should be tailored to the consumers you want to reach, identifying their needs and interests and providing valuable information that establishes your business as a trusted resource or authority.
The goal of content marketing is to give your audience something of value that makes them think highly of your company and consider your brand a trusted source.
Know your audience. Know what questions they are asking and what information they are looking for. Then, give them fresh insight and valuable information that establishes your brand as a company they’ll think of and return to when they are ready to buy.
Providing unique insight and information is also a key part of creating the people-first content that Google prefers (more on that in tip 5).
Search intent, or user intent, is the reason or intention behind someone’s online search.
If someone has just spilled coffee on their white sofa, they might grab their phone and enter search terms relevant to help solve their immediate problem. In this case, the search intent is informational and to remove coffee stains.
When you craft a content marketing piece, whether it’s a blog article, landing page, product description, or social media video, the user’s search intent should be at the root of the content you create.
The goal of your content is to educate, inform, and entertain. To do these things, you must first understand what your customers are searching for, what their interests are, or what problem they need help solving.
People-first content is directly related to search intent. Google prioritizes content containing helpful and reliable information intended to benefit people.
If you are creating content solely intended to rank on the SERPs (search engine results pages) such as by using tactics like keyword stuffing (see our next tip), it misses the point.
Create great content that is insightful, fresh, authoritative, and comprehensive for the best results.
Avoiding keyword stuffing goes hand-in-hand with search intent and people-first content.
Keyword stuffing is essentially cramming as many keywords and keyword phrases as possible into your content. It’s a bad practice that makes writing sound unnatural. Keyword-stuffed content can negatively impact your SEO and provide a poor user experience.
Alternatively, if you focus on high-quality content that is people-first and responds to search intent, you’ll find the incorporation of important keywords comes naturally.
The goal of content marketing is to establish your business as a thought leader. An expert in the field. A trusted place to turn to when they are ready to buy or subscribe to a service. You'll miss that goal if you use low-quality, AI-generated content.
Generative AI might have a role in some creative processes.
However, creating critical content intended to elevate your brand shouldn’t just be in the hands of AI. After all, Google may penalize AI content that doesn’t comply with its spam policies.
High-quality content is insightful, well-researched, and has a fresh perspective based on real-world experience.
This is where the heart of your brand — and the human creatives who know it — comes in.
Learn more about the issues with AI text in web publishing.
Missing a call to action (CTA) is a common error in all types of marketing.
In direct advertising, it is easy to include a CTA such as “Buy now!” or “Call today.”
However, the call to action in content marketing is a little different, especially when avoiding overtly promotional or salesy language.
When you create an article, video, or other piece of content, think about what you want the reader to do to further their engagement.
Examples may include “Subscribe to our newsletter,” “Opt-in to our emails,” or “Download our guide.” This is also a great spot to highlight a lead magnet.
This might be a conversation that involves the entire team, including sales. What next step gets the audience further into the customer journey?
Once you know your audience, your goal is to reach as many people within it as possible.
Readability is a measure of how understandable your content is. Knowing how to make content readable to the widest range of people in your audience is vital.
You invest a lot of work into your content marketing; addressing readability ensures more people can connect with it.
Conveniently review the readability of your content with the Originality.ai Readability Checker.
Word count should correlate with the topic you are writing about. Your blog articles, for instance, should be as long as they need to be for thorough and engaging coverage. Longer is not always better.
After analyzing 900 million pages of content, Ahrefs advises that it’s better to prioritize the quality of content over word count (although they recommend 300 words as an average minimum starting point to communicate topics).
To cover your topic properly and address SEO, remember the idea of people-first content and strive for E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Follow all the best practices of great content, and you’ll know the right length when you reach it.
One of the most common mistakes is expecting that content marketing will be a quick fix. Content marketing is more of a long game.
True authority and customer loyalty are earned over time. When content marketing is working, customer engagement, brand awareness, and lead generation will follow. But it takes time.
Plan your content marketing strategy accordingly and build in the monitoring and benchmarking of key content marketing metrics that are relevant to your goals:
Celebrate small successes as they come, and keep creating quality content as you patiently await the payoffs of the long-term strategy.
In content marketing, authentic, thorough, well-crafted content that puts the audience first will yield better results. If your team keeps that in mind, you’ll encounter fewer of these common mistakes.
Learn more content marketing tips and insights in our top guides:
