If you tried to count all the dos and don'ts in content marketing, you'd run out of fingers and toes pretty quickly. To keep it simple, we've collected the seven deadly sins of content marketing.
Somewhere along the line, you start adding the odd call-to-action to your content. Your 'buy now!' button exceeds expectations and your 'sign up here!' sign brings in hundreds of new leads, but it's not enough for you. Your CTAs get bigger and bigger, pushier and pushier, and more and more populous. Eventually, your greed leaves your carefully composed content coming across as plain old advertising, rather than the content your clients crave.
You make an amazing infographic, write a unique article or shoot an inspiring video. Then you share it on all your social media. And again. And again. And again.
Remember, you should stick to a posting schedule of roughly three tweets a day and two Facebook posts per day. If you are sharing any more than that, and particularly if it's the same content, prepare to watch as your followers virtually dissolve.
Keeping up new content is easy at first. You post something a few times a week and keep your landing pages up to date. Soon, other projects begin to take over and you don't have the time to stay on top of it all. Over time your content production slows to a dribble.
Lazily created, seldom updated content is the nemesis of good content marketing. Posting quality content frequently works wonders for customer acquisition, so make sure to keep up with a regular posting schedule.
All marketers have felt the insatiable desire for bigger, better ROI. Those who don't keep it in check beware, desire for the idyllic ROI can drive a marketer to outlandish efforts to achieve instant gratification.
Certain channels can offer results more quickly, such as PPC and paid social media promotion. If the lust for such results is too strong, channels that better serve long-term results may fall by the wayside. Analyse your audience to determine where, when, why, and how they find their content. Then find a balance among your various promotional channels to maximise your visibility without overwhelming your readers. It may take time, but it will pay off.
Once you get a taste for content, it can be hard to stop. Overindulgence sets in and before you know it, your paragraphs are the size of pages, your word counts resemble novellas, your videos are as long as soap operas and your description tags cut off half way.
Not to mention, you repeat your favourite keyword once every two lines.
Make some restrictions to your content feast and your bottom (line) will thank you for it.
We've all done stupid things in a fit of extreme anger, but the emotion is a human one and should have no part in content marketing.
Iconic leaders and anonymous social media posters occasionally fly off the Twitter handle via social media accounts, seemingly forgetting that all their posts are part of their content.
It's surprising really, how quickly one ill-thought post can earn the judgement of so many.
If there's one truism in life, it's that someone, somewhere, is better than you. Another company may have a better idea than you, a bigger image, a better joke. And you want it, you want it bad.
You envy it so much that you figure you'll just borrow parts of it…or all of it. This is known to lawyers as plagiarism and is a practice that can do a lot more damage than simply missing out on a sale or two.
Don't jeopardise the fate of your business with poor content marketing. For memorable, perfectly curated (some may even say divine) digital content, get in touch with the team at Croud Australia.