Learn guidelines and pitfalls of content marketing, and march to great success!

Learn guidelines and pitfalls of content marketing, and march to great success!

All areas of life have guidelines and pitfalls. To move to the top, we need to learn them. We show these to you in the area of content marketing

Guidelines

• Cater to needs– Many people have their own business blogs. People are just not interested in knowing someone's business.  They are looking valuable content in exchange for their attention that can be knowledgeable, educating, entertaining and so on. 

• Guide, don’t openly sell – We need to guide people without openly selling our product. We can of course promote a product gently in the process.

• No strategy-  Many organisations make the mistake of skipping past the strategy. We should avoid this by doing research on resources, metrics and the content’s role. 

• Easy to find content   Termed cornerstone content, this refers to content that can be categorized and archived in a way that’s easy for customers to find. The best part about this is that it greatly increases the ROI of content production. Each article brings a return on investment over a long period of time. 

• Educate  for free – Give  some value in advance. This definitely brings in customers. So, we could go to some extra miles here. 

• Focus on niche – We must define the right audience and then develop relevant content. People who follows this are the winners.

Deliver quality – Always aim for excellence in content. With so much saturated data, only this type of content works.

• Be real– Be genuine,sincere and be authentic. This with deliver results for sure
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• Use a well established rule-  To get the right amount of content types remember the rule of third. 1/3rd of the content should be original, 1/3rd should be licensed and  1/3rd should be user generated or influencer based. It can be adjusted as we move along.

• Winning with Visual content – Audience process visual information much faster, in fact 60.000 times faster than text. Combining text with appropriate visual content gives many opportunities to win audiences.

Pitfalls in Content Marketing

The common pitfalls in this area are :-

• Lack of Consistency – Content and its marketing is a long process that keeps on changing as per the circumstances. One needs to always be consistent and regular

• Poor quality– This is always unacceptable. Quality should be excellent and production should be rich.

• Not being present in the entire lifecycle – What we create sh continuously engage the audience throughout the lifecycle, past the point of sale—from awareness to advocacy. Because ultimately, the end goal of content marketing and the reason for addressing each stage of the lifecycle of people, especially the customer is to continuously deliver valuable content that solidifies profitable, long-term customer relationships and brand advocates. 

• Don’t view this as a means for SEO-  It’s true that content marketing done right can and will increase search rankings and drive web traffic. But SEO is an ancillary benefit of content marketing—a subset of the program.

• Picking the wrong content type – Two key questions before starting needs to be 1) What sort of content will help me achieve my final goal? 2} Based on  market analytics what type of content will keep audience engaged? Audience’s preferences matter here rather than personal preferences.

•  No measurement We won’t know our   content marketing’s effectiveness unless we measure its performance. This makes measuring ROI also much easier. Ultimately metrics will determine the rate of  success and failure.

• Making content too difficult to get– We should not make the visitors wait for too long to access your content.  We must simplify the process for them to access it without any delay. 

• Not distributing the content – Effective distribution always helps in making campaigns successful. Don’t just post it on the website. Do social media sharing, invest in SEO.

• Not engaging after publishing -  Follow the content and keep track. Don’t just post and forget. We need to monitor lead generation forms and check social media accounts. In fact, we could include call to action in content itself.

• Launching without clear goals – Before starting up with content writing, we need to be clear about our goals. The goals can be educating about a product & services, lead conversion, brand awareness, shares, selling and so on. Content without goal is not marketing.

 It is said that if a drop of water falls in a lake, there is no identity. However, when it falls on a leaf of lotus, it shines like a pearl.

It is also said that the same is the case with content marketing as well. When  proper research is done to frame content for the target audience and they accept it the content can do wonders.  The benefits will not be all of sudden, it is usually gradual but yes it would last for a life time.