6 Mistakes You’re Making With Your Content Marketing (and What to Do About It)
From ad hoc content creation to skipping promotion, these mistakes are costing you.
By Kyle Crafton
As with most things in life, learning from your mistakes is a great way to make improvements. That holds true for your content marketing efforts, too. While a certain amount of trial and error is to be expected, relying solely on ad hoc content and lack of strategy is, well, no strategy at all.
Here are six common mistakes you may be making with your content marketing — and how to fix it.
1. You don’t have a brand guide.
If you don’t have a brand guide that clearly details audiences, brand goals, voice, tone and personality, it makes it hard to accurately represent your brand via content. Even worse, it makes it nearly impossible for multiple content creators to contribute to a brand’s marketing materials without ending up with contradictory and disjointed messaging.
2. You don’t have an editorial calendar.
Many brands know they should be creating content. But when it comes time to write a blog or post a social media update, writer’s block sets in. You either end up sharing low-quality content, or you don’t publish anything at all. Ad hoc content creation can also lead to incongruous messaging — a disconnected string of content posts do not a brand story make.
3. You “spray and pray.”
Posting content across your channels without any thought to channel-specific audiences or features may work for a while, but it’s not a sustainable approach. “Spraying” your content everywhere you can and “praying” that it will work for you is no strategy at all.
4. You’re not tracking anything.
Monitoring and reporting on your content performance is the only way you’ll learn what’s working and what’s not. If you’re not looking at metrics and analytics, you could be wasting a lot of time and money on underperforming content initiatives.
5. It’s all about you.
Yes, at the end of the day, your content should be inextricably tied to your brand identity. But no one likes an egoist, and brands that do nothing but talk about “me, me, me” rarely offer customers anything valuable.
6. You’re not promoting your efforts.
Putting content on a blog or website and hoping people will find it organically is only one small piece of a content marketing strategy. Content without promotion is often dead in the water.
Never fear: Learning from mistakes only makes you stronger. Need a little guidance? We’re here to help, obviously.
Kyle’s career experience spans the media landscape, beginning as a magazine publisher and later as CFO and publisher of MediaBistro.com. He served as the publisher and GM of the Curbed Network, now part of Vox media. In 2010, he swapped New York City for Arizona and dove into agency life, leading digital initiatives — design and development, interactive marketing, UX and search — and working with clients such as Nationwide Insurance, Charles Schwab and NASCAR.
Kyle has taught courses on digital media entrepreneurship and the business and future of journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. He feels at home among the many Chicago ex-pats in Phoenix. His passions include cooking, college basketball and spending time with his (significantly more talented) creative director wife, his tween children and his dog.