…And how to avoid them!
Content marketing is a powerful tool which can make a business much more profitable. By posting materials related to the field you specialize in, you can attract the attention of prospective clients and turn them into actual customers.
But developing a content strategy is not an easy task, and there are many pitfalls which can make all your efforts fruitless.
It is especially true of those teams that cannot boast a professional content writer equipped with marketing knowledge. Here are some of the problems that may underlie the inefficiency of your content strategy.
Emphasis on High-Quality Content
The overwhelming majority of new businesses focus on advertising in order to reach a wider audience – and for good reason. Regardless of what your services are, your task is to make everyone knows what you provide. A comprehensive content strategy aims to help you achieve this goal, and once a website is set up, the flow of content should be constant.
New businesses invest a lot in content, but in many cases, this approach turns out to be ineffective, if not detrimental to a website’s popularity. But why?
The problem is that keywords – what industry experts see as the key to an advertising campaign’s success – are not the cornerstone of content. It is not without reason that content writers strive to include as many of them into their articles, but it is often the case that quality is sacrificed for quantity.
Imagine that you want to read up on language learning – and, perhaps, find a language school afterwards. Before setting out on a journey and trying one school after another (only to find that they are more or less the same on the face of it), you decide to do some research and find out what effective education entails.
Within a couple of clicks, you find a page with an article revolving around learning strategy efficiency – at least it’s what the title suggests.
But you keep scrolling…and you get to this: “Education has long been an indispensable part of our life. As far back as in the 6th century BC…” Come on! This information is irrelevant! You scroll down and see the following: “How to make learning effective – this is the question many ask when…” Ugh.
Enough of that.
As seen from the example above, content should be useful to the reader – that’s what they are looking for. Do not write content for search engines, because marketing is not an end itself. It is your target audience’s needs that you should focus on.
So the three major problems with poorly written content are:
- Lack of informative content
- Trying to squeeze lots of keywords into an article and making it unreadable by doing so
- Prioritising content that is of little use to prospective customers.
Remember: if you manage to help your audience by providing them with advice, information or some other really informative content, chances are they will trust you and buy from you.
That’s what your visitors should not be like when reading your content
Focus on Your Customers-
The customers who are familiar with your service quality are already part of your customer base. If you want your business to expand, you should try to reach out to a wider audience by promoting your pages. Investing in links is not the only option. There are ways to attract new clients that are even better, given their effectiveness and affordability (if you are ready to take an active part in content development).
Social media is a great place to promote your products because people love sharing what they like. But posting bare links is unlikely to result in campaign success. Instead, consider presenting case studies, producing free samples of something you offer, and delving into the issues that your potential audience is interested in. Analyze the market and compile a list of things you can enrich your range of services with.
Failure to develop your content and constantly improving it so that it embraces a wide range of things can derail your content strategy.
Become Technical!
Even if your content is ultimately useful, ensuring access to it is key. Your website visitors are actually not that patient – the slower your pages load, the more likely they are to throw in the towel and go search elsewhere.
That is why investing in a high-quality website is worth every penny. The same is true of hosting services. Poorly written code can seriously affect loading times, but imperfect pages are not the only factor contributing to slow loading. Hosting providers vary in their quality of services, and even price tags are not necessarily indicative of reliability. Before entrusting a hosting provider with your pages – and content! – make sure its performance has been good recently. There are many tools for it available online, such as HRANK or NetCraft. It is more difficult to get rid of errors in code because it takes a professional to handle such things. Leaving slow websites as they are to save on maintenance bills can prove to be detrimental to website popularity, in the long run, so do not put it on the back burner.
Content strategy development is more difficult than that, but these pitfalls are what many new companies often fall victim to. The message here is that you should value your potential customers’ time: provide the content that is really interesting and do not forget to make user experience enjoyable and easy.
