What Mistakes do Companies New to Content Marketing Make?

Jun 15th 2017

What Mistakes do Companies New to Content Marketing Make?

In our first installment of the #AskaDigitalMarketer video series, Director of Digital Marketer Ryan McDonald and Content Marketing Coordinator Carly Schoonhoven tackle the question: “What are the biggest mistakes companies new to content marketing make?”

Have a marketing question you want answered by someone on the Iterate team? Send us an email at hello@iteratemarketing.com!

Video Transcript:

Content marketing is hard and there are a lot of different ways that companies get tripped up when doing content marketing for the first time. So me and Ryan went ahead and detailed four

different mistakes that companies tend to make when they are brand new to content marketing.

1: Writing About Your Product Too Much

So the first mistake that companies who are new to content marketing make is writing about their product too much. So you’ve got product marketing content and you’ve got content marketing and these are not the same thing.

So what ends up happening is that your customers reading your blog post and they’re expecting something that’s going to educate or entertain them, and instead they end up getting a pitch for your product that’s disguised as a blog post. This is really going to erode the trust between you and your audience so when you’re doing content marketing just leave your products out of it. Content marketing is not about your products.

2: Writing For SEO Not Audience

So you do your keyword research you have a big list of topics and you go write a whole bunch of blog posts expecting Google to rank you for these terms. There’s really two problems with this

Strategy.

The first is that in most industries today your competitors have already been doing this strategy for a half decade or longer so you really have no competitive advantage in creating this kind of content and you might not even rank at the end of the day for it anyway.

So the second issue is when you write content for search engines about keywords you sort of lose focus on solving your customer’s problems and that’s what content marketing is all about. So the more that you can write about the solutions to the problems that your customers have the better off you’ll be.

3: Writing About Too Many Topics

So the third mistake we see companies who are new to content marketing making is writing about too many topics. So you’ve got your editorial calendar and you fill it up with news events and those made up Twitter holidays like national unicorn day or national puppy day, and suddenly what happens is either your project is way too ambitious and you can’t get it off the ground, or you

just spread yourself way too thin and you don’t really end up seeing results from any of your content because you’re just all over the place.

So essentially what you want to do is position yourself as an expert on one or maybe a couple of topics, and the benefit of that is also that you can then repurpose your content into ebooks, or courses, or webinars and start to see results over time from one topic that’s really relevant to your business.

4: Expecting Sales Results in the Short Term

So we all know that content marketing takes time to kick in it’s not an overnight sort of band-aid you can apply on top of your marketing efforts. My best suggestion is in the short term to choose your KPIs very carefully track them closely and stay focused on those really important metrics that drive traction for your program.

Look at sales results three months later, six months down the road, maybe even a year down the road, but don’t expect sales uptick from content marketing in the first, you know, several weeks, several months of your program.

So those are the four issues we see companies who are new to content marketing running into most often. If you’d like to see one of your questions answered on video go ahead and shoot us an email at hello@iteratemarketing.com or leave us a comment below!

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