In today’s age, content creation has become an essential aspect of driving a successful business strategy. Every business across every industry is producing and publishing Marketing content online to establish their online presence. Add in technology and AI, and you have a sandbox for creative ideas, niches within niches, and an abundance of content that makes it challenging to stand out from the crowd. Here are some mind-blowing statistics about content marketing today:
- The content marketing industry is worth more than $400 billion worldwide, and is estimate to grow close to $900 billion by 2028.
- Content marketing can cost over 60% less than traditional outbound marketing efforts, yet it can generate up to 3 times the leads.
- Customers are more likely to buy from a brand that has engaging content, with 82% reporting a strong preference for brands with content presence.
When starting out, businesses often find themselves making 3 crucial mistakes with their content creation activities, hindering their ability to see results. If you’re guilty of making these mistakes, note that you’re not alone. Content creation can be a highly competitive affair. Every day we find ourselves in the middle of a battle, a battle for our attention. By identifying these mistakes, you can work towards slowly phasing them out one at a time. As a result, you will be able to produce high quality content that engages with your audience, increase your online presence, attract more customers, and increase your ROI with ease – because people trust people, right?
Mistake #1: Not knowing or caring about your audience
When starting out, it’s tempting to publish as much content as possible, like casting a fish net with the hope of capturing attention. The problem, however, is that this approach may not necessarily be the best option for your target audience. Businesses often fall into the trap of creating the content that they want, rather than what their audience needs. As a result, they fail to truly connect with their customers. The ‘who’ matters just as much, if not more than the ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’. Look through an emotional lens, how are you making people feel?
The audience will also determine what medium you use for your content creation activities. For example, marketing efforts that targets teenagers for a new cosmetic product will differ from marketing efforts that targets the elderly for a luxury retirement village.
How to fix it
The first step towards fixing this is to clearly define your target market before putting content out. One way to do this is to conduct market research, collect customer data and craft personas that identify the segments of people who are potential buyers of your product or service. This can be businesses, or end-user customers depending on the nature of your business. Once you know your audience’s intent, you can create a brief that outlines your intent as well, helping your content creating team create high quality, engaging content with the relevant keywords that reach the right people at the right time.
After identifying your target market, you can use the data to redefine your call-to-action (CTA). The CTA is an essential aspect of content, without which you lose the chance to convert a viewer to a read. All content formats should let the customer know what to do next, and different formats can be tailored with different CTAs to help you get the most out of your content creation efforts. This is all about the user experience, making it obvious and easy for people to action is a critical step for your content’s success.
For example, if your business is selling an online consulting service to other organisations, your CTA at the end of your content pieces may include a link to an e-book, a scheduling page to book a consultation, or a mailing list to receive new updates. Find your audience and put them in the center of your content map.
Mistake #2: Lack of content variety
You’ve done the work, you’ve built the persona, you’ve crafted the content, now it’s time to bring it all together. Here’s the question, what media do you use to do it? Different mediums can offer different benefits to your business, and repeating the same format for each content piece can limit your potential to see results. For example, using infographics and articles are great, but they don’t offer the same interactive engagement that videos and motion graphics can.
Content variety is essential if you want to set yourself apart from the rest. The platform your content sits on goes hand in hand with the topic and theme of your content. Remember that not all customers or businesses prefer the same type of content. While blogs and articles may be informative for some, they may not necessarily appeal to those who prefer visual or audio-based content instead.
How to fix it
Mix it up. Think of like cooking. The food you’re cooking, and the preparation style for it go hand in hand. While grilling works for some foods, roasting works for others. Mixing it up is the key to keeping things new and refreshing.
Outline the goal of your content. Are you trying to increase brand awareness? Increase social media engagement or website impressions to get more leads? Now, use the audience you have identified, and think about what their media consumption and online behaviour patterns are.
Once you have the goal and the audience, the last step is to tell a great story. Great storytelling can be achieved through any form of content, and this is what you need to capitalise on to win your audience’s attention. Include clear messages, highlight your service offering as a solution to the problem, and guide them to the next step. Do this consistently and through various forms of content, and you’ll have a recipe for success.
Mistake #3: Not measuring or understanding your results
You can publish whatever you want, and you can publish as much as you want, on as many channels as you want. If you’re not measuring the results of your campaign, you will find that your efforts could have been going to waste. Tracking your success from each type of content will give you the insights you need to identify what platform is performing well and why. Publishing content that has a purpose, aligns to your goals, and can be measured will help you make more informed decisions around pivoting or optimising content to provide maximum results.
How to fix it
Depending on the type of content, the metrics for review will vary. It’s helpful to analyse each metric for each platform to stay on top of your content campaign and plan future pieces accordingly. Social media and Google analytics allow you to track metrics such as website impressions, social post click through rates, video views and interactions, and much more. Once you have a breadth of content published, you can zoom out and track the type of content gets the most engagement with your audience. Based on this, you can plan future pieces that give the audience what they want. You can map out a content schedule to ensure you remain consistent with your content creation.
These 3 mistakes work in unison with one another and can be illustrated in the form of a cycle. Identify your audience to find out what they want, create a variety of engaging content for that audience, then measure results and understand what you’ve learnt from the process. With this data, you can find what works for your brand and who it works for, leading you back to re-evaluating your target audience and examining how you can expand your reach to propel your brand even further.
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