9 Mistakes in Content Marketing Business Owners Still Make

Many small business owners take on content marketing all on their own for the lack of funding to pay out for these projects. This includes online ads, social media posts, blogs and related media. Content marketing requires more than pairing a witty caption with a nice photo. And despite all the tips available, many small businesses make crucial mistakes that prevent them from achieving the best results from their content marketing efforts.

Here are 9 common mistakes and why you should avoid them at all costs.

1. No Call to Action

A post that lacks a call to action is a passive way to take up space on the Internet. As a viewer sees your post, you want to encourage them to engage with your business. Invite them to subscribe to a mailing list or purchase a product. This makes it convenient for the viewer and keeps you in their memory a lot longer than simply showing information. Keep your content interactive at all times.

2. Reaching Out to the Wrong Audience

If you have incredible content and you’re posting it consistently, but you’re not catching any fish on your hook, think of the audience. If you don’t know who your target is and where they are, you might be sharing to the wrong demographic or spending too much time on a social media platform that your audience doesn’t use.

3. Lack of Planning

It’s tough to create awesome content every single day or even every single week. Whip out your calendar and start planning what you’d like to have posted and created in advance. Take into consideration how fast things change in your industry and create a plan according to that factor. It’s better to create a content plan for at least a month.

4. Advertising Only One Service

Let’s say you own a salon that offers hair services, nail services, and makeup. It won’t do you any good if you’re only sharing information about hair services. Or if you’re advertising to women only. While every business has services or products that do better than others, you’re cutting yourself short by not making all of your business clear to the market.

5. Ignoring Remarketing

Your best customers are often repeat customers. Many small business owners are so preoccupied with gaining new customers that they forget to tell their past clients to come back. It’s important to let a client who hasn’t visited in months that you’ve got a sale going on, new services or products. Remarket is one of the biggest sources of income today.

6. Refuse from Outsourcing

In this do-it-yourself society, many small business owners take it upon themselves to create the content. It’s not always reasonable. If you’re not a photographer, find a perspective photographer who needs to build the portfolio and can do photos for you for cheap. Are you a horrible writer, or don’t write well in the language you’re marketing in? Hire a freelance writer from such platforms as EssayTigers or Upwork to get content at a low price.

7. Too Much Sales

Just because it’s called content marketing, doesn’t mean it’s time to give your best sales pitch. What makes content marketing so effective, is that you’re essentially dispensing relevant information to your audience about the industry and topic that you work in. While it should be reminiscent of your brand and lead back to you and your product, don’t outright sell to the viewer.

8. Content is Too Specific

One of the most important aspects of content marketing is that it’s evergreen. Evergreen content does really well online because it’s helpful at anytime and people can learn from your information today or two years from now. An article on the best fall looks of 2005 don’t apply anymore because fashion has turned over a million times since then. But an article detailing outfits that are appropriate for an office setting will be useful to readers for years. So make sure you aren’t sharing and creating content that can phase out quickly.

9. You’re Not Using SEO Practices

SEO isn’t EVERYTHING, but it’s THE MOST IMPORTANT way to gain traffic. While you don’t want to fluff your content or make it sound awkward by quoting SEO tags and phrases every five words, you do want to tailor your content so that it’s easily found by people looking for exactly what you offer. Be sure to take a look at exactly what SEO tagline will work with your form of content and apply them.

Written by Stacey Wonder