Content marketing is really like a first date. If all you do is talk about yourself, there won’t be a second date.
– David Beebe
Content marketing is a way to plan, create, and distribute valuable, trusted, and relevant content to help attract and engage a clearly defined audience.
For the B2B sector, content marketing continues to rise as a strategy that marketers use to build a business’s audience by helping to develop and reinforce brand affinity. It’s through building and maintaining these relationships that marketers can drive leads and sales.
The rise of content marketing shows no signs of slowing down. But, with so much content available, creators who don’t produce helpful, engaging, and high-quality content will miss out on potential leads.
To help, we’ve outlined some of the most common mistakes B2B content creators are still making today.
Not having a clear strategy
Far too many companies launch headfirst into producing random blogs, investing in videos, and sharing their content on social media platforms like LinkedIn without understanding why.
Creating a clearly defined content strategy acts like a roadmap linking business objectives, audience research, and customer needs. Content strategies will help you determine your goals, set priorities, and improve marketing results and ROI.
Not defining your audience
It’s not enough to simply create content that speaks about your products and services. To be influential, creators need to produce content with specific personas of their ideal customers in mind.
Creating customer avatars will help guide your choices when creating content and what you do with it. What social media platforms do they use? How do they speak? What problems are they facing? Having answers to these questions will make your content more effective at converting prospects into leads and sales.
Being overly ‘Salesy’
It’s vital to remember that top-of-the-funnel content should be designed to help and inform potential leads about the benefits of using your products or services. Content that is too promotional at this stage risks turning prospects away.
Focusing on helping potential customers with the problems they’re facing helps to build confidence and trust in your brand while simultaneously showcasing your expertise.
They forget they’re talking to people
Content creators need to create content for the people consuming it, not solely for search engine algorithms. Google and other search engines can recognize when an organic blog post is valuable to readers and will promote it in search rankings.
It is still essential to use the right keywords and optimize content for search engines to be viewed first, but always remember who’ll benefit from your content and what message you want to leave them.
Quantity over quality
Most marketers know to rank for certain keywords consistently, they need to produce regular content. Otherwise, they run the risk of newer, fresher content taking their place.
However, simply producing endless subpar content won’t help you either. Focusing on fewer high-quality posts will convert more leads than sharing tons of poorly researched content that doesn’t provide value. Don’t waste your time and budget producing low-quality content that also risks watering down your reputation in the process.
These mistakes are just some of the errors content creators might make. Other mistakes include ignoring SEO and email marketing, lacking inbound and outbound links, not creating relevant content, or delivering content at the wrong time could all affect how your content performs.
Is your business using social media’s full potential?
At Brieffin, we use our expertise to unlock everything social media offers your business or personal brand. We use our experience in content creation, strategy and planning, and social media management to help build consistency and deliver marketing success. Let’s talk.
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