(cache) The 5 Most Common Content Marketing Blunders That Are Scaring Away Readers

How have your content marketing efforts been?

Are they paying off?

Are you getting your expected return on investment (ROI) or are you unconsciously driving your readers away as a result of your poor content marketing tactics?

Sprout Worth recently stated that:

“More than 50% of the most effective content marketers on the internet put out new content types for their readers at least many times a week, if not every day.”

What do you say to that?

Content marketing is considered to be one of the best marketing techniques for generating targeted leads. It is a cheap and efficient means of getting to your audience without much hassle.

However, for you to break even with content marketing, you’re required to write kick-ass, result oriented, and compelling articles that your readers will always find useful and relevant.

Sadly, many content marketers are committing some blunders that are massively sabotaging their efforts, thereby scaring their readers away.

If you’re not yet getting results from your content marketing, I advise you pay attention to this article.

5 Hidden Content Marketing Blunders That Are Scaring Your Readers Away

1. You Don’t Know Who Your Customers Are

Your customers are the primary reason why you’re in business. Without them, you’re wouldn’t be in business… Period.

I see people that are always churning out article after article without even knowing who they’re writing for. That’s a terrible way to run a marketing strategy.

In his recent article on Entrepreneur, Michael Kaleikini stated that:

“In marketing, if you have no target it’s just like the motivational speech of ‘Shoot for the moon if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.’ It just doesn’t work that way in business. You’ll be shooting into the black expanses of space–where no one exists.”

Typically, identifying your target audience is a big step toward creating a great content marketing strategy that will address your reader’s problems.

This goes beyond knowing who your customers are; it involves getting to know what they want, how they want it, and what can trigger their interest.

You need to know what they believe in, their biggest struggles, and their willingness to find a solution to those struggles.

You can do this by taking full advantage of every opportunity to know them better.

Through social media, you can get feedback from those who already patronize you. You can also conduct a survey to get more useful information about them.

This is just the beginning, though. You need to take it all a step further by engaging and connecting with them.

This knowledge will be instrumental in helping you provide them with the best solutions that will meet their needs. This way, your content will be of great value to them (and will become very successful).

However, not doing a thorough check on your customers and not having a proper understanding of what they want is a great marketing blunder that could lead to significant losses in the long run.

This graphic from Unbounce summarizes the three primary reasons why you must identify your target audience in content marketing:

Similarly, I also dug up a perfect analogy on the Quick Sprout blog as to the benefits of knowing your customers:

Keep your messages targeted and you’ll have more success.

2. Your Contents Sucks

Your target audience is sick and fed up with mediocre content.

Regardless of the effort, you put into writing your content, content that isn’t great will not give off a good result.

It will not be well received by your readers, and Google will definitely rank you accordingly. If you are lucky, Google will put you on page 50…

Is that the worst case scenario? Not at all.

Not only will you put your reputation at stake, you will also lose your readers.

Quality content is informative, actionable, evergreen, and ensures your readers are coming back for more.

Most of all, good content should be designed to entertain and educate at the same time. This is the exact type of article savvy marketers always strive to publish, and what both Google and readers are constantly looking for.

Similarly, great content should contain a great call to action. This will motivate your reader to take the necessary steps toward finding a solution to their problems after reading your post.

The importance of this is highlighted by this assertion by Small Business Trends that:

“70% of small businesses have no call to action on their homepage.”

When you’re in the habit of dishing out crappy content, the possibility of increasing your email list will also be crappy. People who don’t like your content aren’t going to want to sign up to your email list to get more of the same bad content.

One of the critical qualities of good content is that it must solve a problem.

An excellent article that doesn’t address a problem will not get a better reception than a poorly written article that solves a problem.

For example, assuming you’re writing an article on ‘content marketing blunders’, readers won’t find an article on ‘how to monetize content’ useful.

This reader, feeling unfulfilled, may decide to look for another provider and immediately log out of your website without bothering to check other articles.

This increases the bounce rate of your blog, an important factor for search engines when ranking websites.

If a visitor cannot find what he/she wants, you have already lost a reader. This underscores the importance of understanding the needs of your readers and addressing those needs in your content.

You need to always be publishing great content.

3. Thinking That More Content Means More Traffic

Come on… who taught you this?

OK, I guess you’ve heard a lot on the internet that one of the ways to gain the trust of Google is to be updating your blog consistently. But you shouldn’t fill up your blog with garbage just to satisfy this “requirement”.

Let me tell you: You need to change your thinking.

Do you want to know the truth?

It is way better to publish one quality and informative article per week than it is to be dishing out seven mediocre articles per week.

The best practice is always to take your time and ensure each article you publish on your blog will be well-received.

That said, if you have a lot of time and think you can be publishing multiple quality articles/week, you definitely should.

But never sacrifice quality for quantity.

Read:

4. You’re All For The Money

A lot of content marketers are always putting money first before their audience, and this attitude will almost always backfire.

Educating the reader should be the first objective of content marketing.

You teach readers how to solve personal problems and how to get the needed assistance. This is followed by marketing a product.

You shouldn’t mix things up when devising your content marketing strategy. Giving people the impression that you are selling a product without taking the first step of teaching them anything will be counterproductive.

For instance, if your content is about how to change a car battery, your content should first address the challenging nature of changing car batteries. THEN you can highlight how your product will assist them to change their car battery.

That way, they will see why they should buy your product.

Always focus on your readers first. Solve their problems as you would your own.

If your goal is to help your customer, the money will always come.

5. Not Properly Proofreading Your Contents

Committing this writing sin is a surefire recipe for disaster.

Now, you are not expected to become a perfectionist, but the quality of your writing is one of the major factors that determines how likely people are to read your stuff.

This, to a great extent, will influence their opinions about you and your business.

If your content has tons of spelling and/or grammatical errors, your customers will put a question mark on your professionalism.

The quality and effectiveness of your products and services will also be questioned.

Why?

Because your content is the mirror of your products. If your content stinks, the general belief is that your products and services won’t fare any better.

A mistake in basic spelling or grammar will undermine the effectiveness of your content as it can completely transform the meaning of your message, even leading to miscommunication.

Therefore, not proofreading your content is an invitation for disaster; your content will never achieve the desired goal.

How to Better Proofread An Article in 6 Simple Steps

How Grammarly Can Help You Stop Making Mistakes in English

Don’t Make Silly Content Marketing Mistakes

Perhaps you have been wondering why you are not getting the desired results from your content marketing campaigns.

Can you go through your articles again and compare them with the list here? Perhaps you have committed some of the highlighted mistakes.

If so, this is the right time to make the necessary adjustments and save your business from crumbling under the weight of poorly written and managed content.

Of course, the positive impact of making these corrections will far outweigh the time and other resources you spend in making the adjustment. You will see more readers getting hooked to your blog.

Which one of these mistakes have you been doing? What are you going to change to supercharge your content marketing efforts? What else can you recommend to newbie marketers? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Here are some more content marketing articles to check out:

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