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4 Mistakes You Should Avoid When Developing A Content Strategy

Content, as we all know, is king. According to Jacob Tyler, a web design firm based in San Diego, content can help people create an emotional connection with your brand. Content will make your business' website appear more often, and in better positions, when people search for terms related to your industry. Content will increase your brand awareness when people interact with it on social networks.

Planning, creation, distribution, and monitoring of content is an important part of how digital marketing is done today. 86% of business-to-customer marketers are using content marketing. Small business aren't exempt - using content in digital marketing is often recommended for small businesses because it can really work. If you do it right. So here are some of the mistakes you should try your hardest not to make when developing a strategy for your content.

1. Being too Vague about Goals

Every content strategy starts with the clear definition of goals. If you say that your goals are simply to make more money, you'll have a hard time devising a strategy that will allow you to do that.

A content strategy works best when it has a very clearly defined goal. Increasing conversion rates is a clearly defined goal. Generating more leads so that you have someone to convert into customers is a good goal. Building brand awareness is another one, as are driving traffic to your website and improving customer retention.

Each of these goals has a type of content that works best for it, and a key performance indicator that says how well your content is doing what you want it to do. If your goals are too vague, planning your content and measuring its results becomes much harder.

2. Opting for Quantity Instead of Quality

You might think that getting the most bang for your buck from content marketing means that, for the amount of money you set as budget in your content strategy, you get as many pieces of content as you possibly can.

But that's not true. There are many reasons why you should be focusing on quality instead of quantity, but these two will suffice.  The first - Google, the biggest search engine in the world and probably the source of most of your website's traffic, is very concerned with quality content.

The second reason is best demonstrated by Business 2 Community's analysis of their own content. They found that the top performing 10% of posts got more pageviews than the remaining 90%. Plus, the top nine pieces of their content generated more than 55% of their leads. The focus should be on creating content that does the most for you, not creating the most content possible.

3. Relying on one Form of Content

When you're working on your content strategy, you'll create a sort of a content calendar that shows when you need to release new content. If that calendar contains only articles, you should reevaluate it.

Articles might seem like the easiest and cheapest form of content to produce. But did you know, for example, that infographics might be three times more shareable over social networks?

You have a wide variety of content to choose from. You can use YouTube video, or photos you can share over Instagram, or Facebook's native video. Yes, the content you can use will depend on the goal you choose for your strategy, but even within those parameters you'll have the freedom to experiment with different forms of content.

Here's an example - when you want to convert leads into customers, you can produce case studies, infographics, or create videos containing product demonstrations. For best results, you should try each of them.

4. Forgetting about Old Content

A business can dabble in content marketing well before they sit down and create an actual strategy. And as long as there's been some content produced before deciding to take your content marketing efforts to the next level, your strategy should include reviewing, reposting, or repurposing of old content.

Your old, underperforming posts can be expanded, rewritten, turned into infographics, or merged with other posts to create better content. A series of successful articles can be a basis for an ebook. Successful articles can also be updated, and you can always repost them on throwback Thursdays.Good content doesn't come cheap. It only makes sense to turn some of the content you already had produced into new and improved pieces.

There are, of course, countless other ways you can ruin your content strategy. The easiest would be not writing it down - a strategy is not something you generally agree about with your marketing team. It's a plan of action, and you need to document everything in it because that will help you learn and improve your next content cycle.

 

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