7 Common Content Mistakes to Avoid for Your Brand

Along with customer mistakes, many brands make content mistakes which is bad for business. As a brand (both B2B & B2C) you need to avoid this. To help you we’ve put together this list of 7 common content mistakes that many brands make and how to solve them.

Why Your Brand Needs Content in the First Place

Unless you’re living under a rock, you would know how important content marketing is to grow your brand especially now in this digital age. When done right, content marketing can help multiple your revenue, increase your brand awareness, establish you as a thought leader in your field and more. This is the reason why most brands (B2B, B2C, B2D and C2B) on the planet have and continue to invest in some type of content marketing or another. They understand that content marketing can be a huge driver of their overall business success and give them a great ROI.

The Challenges of Content Creation that Every Business Should Know

Despite the many benefits of content marketing for your business which far outweigh the disadvantages it’s important to be aware of mistakes. That way you can be better prepared, save money and time for your content efforts. This is invaluable so let’s look at the 7 common content mistakes brands are still making and how you can avoid them.

Content Mistake Number 1- Not Having a Clear Enough Purpose

Just like with any type of marketing you do; you should have a purpose behind it. You shouldn’t just embark on content creation because it’s all the buzz now and everyone else is doing it. Your content must have a clear purpose behind it or else you’ll just end up wasting a lot of time and money. Best practices are:

Identify your top 5-6 objectives for growing & expanding your brand and tie these into your content creation (eg: brand awareness, thought leadership, getting more leads etc).
Know your USP (Unique selling proposition)
Identify your top 5-6 business pain points and see if content can help in removing or reducing these.
Speak to your team about devising a content marketing strategy or hire content experts to devise a tailor-made content strategy for you.

Content Mistake 2- Lack of Audience Knowledge

This happens when you don’t know or understand your target audience enough. Both are detrimental to your content efforts. You must have a solid understanding of both who your audience is and their overall needs, desires, and pain points. If not, your content strategy will be scattered. You won’t know who to market to. You could fall into the trap of marketing to everyone and everything. You want to avoid this ‘scatter gun approach’. Instead follow these best practices:

Create an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
Conduct extensive target audience research (demographics & psychographics)
Create customer profiles
Direct all your content marketing to your audience. Every single piece of content produced should speak to them.

Content Mistake Number 3- A Non Tailored Content Strategy

Sometimes because of time constraints and just overall business pressure, some brands will dive right into content creation with a one-size-fits-all content marketing strategy. This is one of the worst things you can do. Taking time to develop a tailored and well-crafted content marketing strategy is well worth the effort. It lays out a clear and relevant roadmap for your brand. Best practices are:

Set aside sufficient time to create a robust SEO optimised content marketing strategy or hire content marketing experts to devise one for you.
Ensure you have established first who your audience is and even your ideal customer before developing a content marketing strategy.
Regularly review, monitor and adapt your content marketing strategy as things change.

Content Mistake Number 4- Creating Original Content

In a world where no idea or content is really “new”, or at least the chances of it being totally new are very slim, it can present a challenge to your content marketing. After all, everything’s been said and done. But we know that Google and SEO love original content especially now in the age of AI. Many brands and content creators pride themselves on producing ‘original content’. But what does this mean exactly? How do you go about creating so called original content? Follow these best practices:

Don’t rely exclusively on AI for your content creation. Google and other search engines are starting to penalise AI generated content.
Even if your topic isn’t original, give your own unique angle/perspective to it.
Study content in your industry that ranks well and find the gap (what can you add that hasn’t been added?)
Ask: What is something that no one else is talking enough in my industry? (talk about it with content)

Content Mistake Number 5 - Not Promoting Your Content Enough

Effective content creation and overall marketing involves great promotion. That is getting it seen by as many people as possible. Of course, keep in mind that you want the right people to see it (your target audience). Many brands spend a lot of effort in creating content but then don’t promote it or at least don’t promote it enough. This reduces its visibility and power. What’s the point of creating content that no one knows about? Best practices are:

Distribute and share content on all your social media platforms
Share your best content with at least ten people in your industry that will reshare it
Repurpose content into other forms – tweets, blogs, newsletters, PDFs etc
Leverage influencers in your industry to promote your content
Invest in paid promotion eg: Google Ads, Facebook Ads
Follow the 80/20 rule with all your content production. That is 20% in creating content and 80% in promoting & amplifying it

Content Mistake Number 6 - Not Having the Right People Do your Content

You can do all of the above correctly but if you don’t have the right person or people doing your content than its pointless. Every job requires the right professional. Content creation and content marketing is a skill and requires people that are proficient in it. Don’t just get your friends and family or someone cheap to create your content. Instead follow these best practices:

Hire a content specialist/s to help you both plan your content and create it.
Ensure they understand your overall business goals, vision, and key objectives.
Collaborate with your content creator to ensure you’re on the same page.
Look at their past results—what have they achieved for other brands?

Content Mistake Number 7 – Not Measuring and Adapting Content

For any type of marketing, you do you must always measure and track results. This allows you to see what’s working and what’s not working. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. In this day and age with so many tools and resources available both free and paid to measure results you’d be silly not to utilize them. Best practices are:

Tracking results using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Using SEO tools like Afrehs, SEMrush and Ubersuggest to monitor keywords
Performing A\B testing on your content to measure performance
Regularly viewing the built analytics on your social media platforms
Putting in place one weekly metric to measure results. This could be seeing where the source of your website traffic is coming from in that one week.
Staying on top of both industry trends and content creation trends. Google Trends is one great tool to assist you with this.

Avoid these 7 common content mistakes for your brand and you’ll be well on the way to getting great results. For more expert guidance and help with creating content for your brand Contact WORD EMPIRE^®, who turn brands into online empires with world-class content.