As Bill Gates once said, “Content is king,” and he’s right, in a sense. You need to be producing compelling, useful, and original content on a regular basis to establish your expertise, build your brand, and grow your audience. But it’s not enough to simply have the content and put it out there. You need to be working from a content marketing strategy and a content plan that not only incorporates your business’s goals but also incorporates the latest trends in SEO and digital marketing.
If you’ve been trying to promote your business’s content and it doesn’t seem to be working, don’t worry. You might be making one of these three easily fixable and often overlooked content marketing mistakes.
You’re not using SEO effectively.
Content and SEO go hand in hand. SEO, or search engine optimization, is how you get organic traffic from search engines, how many keywords your website rank for and what’s your overall visibility. You want your audience to search for something and have your website show up near the top. But how can you get there?
First, you need to have quality content. Once you have that, you need to do some keyword research to see what your target audience is searching for in order to reach your content. Then, you need to utilize those keyword terms naturally within your content. When you know what your audience is searching for, you can specifically tailor your content to their search terms, which will raise your search rank and drive more traffic your way.
You don’t know your audience.
It isn’t enough to know what your audience is searching for, you also have to know who they are. You can create tons of content, but if your audience doesn’t want to read what you’re putting out, your content will go unnoticed. Instead of creating content and then finding an audience, you need to know who your audience is and then create content specifically for them.
Once you’ve identified your target audience, you need to research them and determine what kind of content they want to see. Look at your analytics and see which posts get the most traffic. Read your audience’s comments on social media to see what they’re interested in. Or you can simply ask them directly. With knowledge of your audience, you can then create the content they want and watch your readership grow.
You have a good content marketing strategy, but your content isn’t useful.
Most of the time, when people search for something online, they’re seeking an answer to a question. The title of this blog is a question many new entrepreneurs or businesses might have when getting started with marketing. It’s a great hook to gain an audience, but if the actual content doesn’t provide any useful information, searchers will have to go somewhere else to get a solution.
You don’t want searchers to go anywhere else. You want to build a relationship with everyone who comes to your website by getting them to stay and read your content. So not only do you need to produce content for your target audience, but it also has to be good content. When creating content, ask yourself if your content is valuable, unique, and interesting. If the answer is no, then you shouldn’t post it.
Once you identify where your content marketing needs a boost and you correct these common mistakes, you’ll be back in the content marketing game in no time.