5 common mistakes when creating content marketing campaigns

Content marketing is a really effective method of letting people get to know you and your brand (peek at some of these stats if you don’t believe me!) But, creating a content marketing campaign can be difficult. There are so many things to consider, from the type of content you create to the channels you use to promote it. To make things even more complicated, there are a lot of common mistakes that business owners make when creating their campaigns. In this blog post, we'll highlight five of the most common mistakes, and show you how to avoid them. Let's get started!

A content marketing campaign is a coordinated effort to create and distribute valuable content to a target audience with the goal of achieving a specific business objective. Content can take many different forms, such as blog posts, infographics, videos, or social media posts, but it must be engaging and useful to the target audience in order to be successful. A good content marketing campaign will help you attract new customers, boost website traffic, and generate leads. On the other hand, a poorly generated content marketing campaign can do more harm than good.

Almost any business can benefit from a well-executed content marketing campaign, but making sure your efforts are effective can be tricky. Here are five of the most common mistakes companies make when creating their content marketing campaigns – and how to avoid them.

1. Not planning your campaigns in advance

Before you even start to create any content, it's important to plan ahead and make sure you know what your goals are for the campaign. What do I want to achieve? How will I measure success ? Who is my target audience? What are my long-term objectives for this campaign? Answering these questions before you start creating your content will help you shape what it should achieve. Once you have the answers, break them down into shorter-term goals that can be achieved within the next few months. Link building and outreach tools can help you find new links, increase social engagement and more - all while generating a comprehensive backlink profile.

2. Focusing too much on SEO

SEO is an important part of any content marketing campaign, but it shouldn't be your focus when creating a piece of content. No matter how amazing your content might be, your target audience won't see it if it has no backlinks and isn't shared socially. SEO can also take a significant amount of time and effort to execute properly. Instead, focus on creating useful content that your target audience will enjoy. If you do your job well, the SEO process will become easier over time.

People spend thousands of dollars hiring SEO experts only to see little results. That's because it's not just about writing content that's stuffed full of keywords, it's about writing things of quality that engage, delight, inform, and inspire your audience! Is it important? Sure! But I’d recommend learning just enough to get started, and learn the rest along the way!

3. Not targeting the right audience

This might seem like an obvious point, but businesses often make the mistake of targeting the wrong audience. It's important to understand your target audience and who exactly you're trying to reach with your campaign . If you're targeting the wrong people, they won't share your content and it will be a waste of effort. Using tools like Google Analytics can help you see statistics such as age, gender, location and interests, which can help you target the right people.

Without knowing who your audience is, it's hard to know how you can really ad value to their lives. What topics are they looking for? Which issues do they care about? Your content should fit perfectly with their needs and interests, otherwise it's destined to fall flat. The temptation is usually to feel like your target audience is everyone.

I call my wife "The Facebook Marketplace Pirate" because she has a way of talking anyone down to a lower price, and selling our old stuff for way more than I ever thought we'd be able to. Whenever I tell her I don't think it'll sell, she says the same thing, "I don't need everyone to buy it, I only need one." When we think about our content marketing campaigns, think like my wife. Don't go wide, go deep. Don't use a machine gun, use a sniper.

4. Focusing on Quantity over Quality

After you have a content marketing plan, it's easy to try and create as much content as possible in the shortest amount of time. However, this often leads to content that isn't high quality. Every content marketing campaign has a limit on resources, whether it's time or money, so focusing too much on quantity will result in low-quality content marketing content. Fewer content pieces of higher quality will go a lot further than post after post of irrelevant or ill-prepared posts, blogs, and articles. This content will pay off in the long run by increasing organic traffic and building links over time.

Most pieces need several edits before they're ready for publication, so rushing the process means selling yourself short on what could be some really great work. Quality is the most important thing you need to make a success with content marketing, so don't skimp on it.

5. Not measuring results to see what's working

Test, test, then test again! Campaigns should be alive, not robotic. It can be useful to track your content in order to see what's working and what isn't. Tools like Google Analytics can help you track how much traffic each content piece receives, where the audience comes from, what content is shared most often, etc. Pay attention to this and hone in on what's working! Tweak it, try it again, try it another way, try it again. Without the proper tracking and measurement tools it's impossible to know how well your campaign is doing. Without any way of measuring your content's success and impact, there isn't much chance that you'll be able to improve and continue doing more content that has a positive outcome on your business.

Final thoughts

So, how can you make sure your content marketing campaigns are successful? By planning ahead, targeting the right audience, focusing on quality over quantity, and measuring results. Sounds like a lot of work? It is! But luckily, I'm here to help. Need help with your content marketing campaign? Let's chat about what you need and how I can make sure your campaigns are firing on all cylinders. Thanks for reading and I hope this is helpful!