The public praise of content marketing is difficult to ignore: one set of data suggests that a brand that publishes 15 new blog posts per month will see 1200 new leads per month, on average.
Somewhere along the way, however, marketers are taking this to mean that simply posting a blog or two a week is all they need to do to explode their brand’s social presence, when in reality, bad habits in content marketing could be hurting ROI.
Here are some common ways bad content can cause your brand to lose the value that content marketing offers.
1. Inconsistent or Stale Content
If your content doesn’t have an audience, it won’t yield new leads. That’s the major difference between a content marketing campaign and an SEO campaign; if your website copy is focused only on SEO, you can get away with bland writing, as long as the keywords are there.
Content marketing, on the other hand, necessitates that thought go into the writing, so that the result is content that is relevant and valuable to your current audience and hopefully, prospective new leads.
2. Writing For the Search Engines Only
Content marketing and SEO are related, but when marketers produce content for the primary purpose of courting search engine rankings, content itself drops in quality.
It’s easy to get caught up worrying about keyword density, but if the content itself isn’t robust and valuable, you’re throwing away benefits of adopting content marketing in the first place.
3. Not Engaging Multiple Channels
Maybe you see some ROI from your blog, but should you rest on your laurels at the faintest sniff of success? There’s a reason why the marketing community can’t seem to agree which content marketing channels are more effective than others.
Different brands have different marketing considerations, so it’s understandable that their lead-maximizing strategies will be different as well. Try different combinations of social media, email newsletters and valuable, sharable blog posts to better reach your audience.
4. Poor or Nonexistent CTAs
Even if your content is otherwise perfect, a Call To Action (CTA), or lack thereof, can hamper your marketing ROI.
No matter how much you spend on content marketing, you won’t see a significant increase in sales without an effective CTA.
The CTA is the bridge that turns your blog audience into a new lead and potential conversion, with a concise statement that shows your product or service’s value to the customer and link to the conversion process.
Without a careful, start-to-finish content marketing strategy, You’re leaving benefits on the table.
How do you maximize the effectiveness of content marketing for your brand, or the brands you write for?
Let me know in the comments section below.
