Content marketing is obviously important, but you’d be amazed to discover that many brands are doing a terrible job of producing content that actually converts. Sure, they publish lots of posts and words, but nothing they produce ever drives readers to action. Sound familiar? You may be making a basic mistake that’s holding your brand back from being successful with content marketing. Here are a few of the most common:
1. Lack of Reader Personas
Who are you writing to when you craft content for your blog or social media profiles? If you can’t answer that question with specificity, it’s possible that you don’t have a very good understanding of who your audience is. The solution is to come up with reader personas.A reader persona is simply a fictional snapshot of your average reader. You can give this profile a name, backstory, and all of that fun stuff, but the point is that it forces you to personify your audience. As a result, the content you craft becomes more targeted and relevant to readers.
2. Slow Page Loading Times
Did you know that the amount of time it takes for pages to load on your website or blog directly impacts important metrics like bounce rates and conversion rates? For an ecommerce site making $100,000 per day, a one second delay in page loading time could cost the company $2.5 million a year.You may not be anywhere near that level, but slow page loading times can still have a negative impact on your content’s ability to reach users. There are lots of potential causes for slow speeds, but bad web hosting is one of the primary culprits.
“Cheaper web hosting companies will sell shared hosting packages to multiple websites and bog down the processors and amount of bandwidth across the server making the websites slow,” one blogger explains. “If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, change your web host company.”
An easy solution is to this is to find a good web hosting provider. While getting your own dedicated server may be out of the question due to budget constraints, a shared or hybrid cloud hosting plan may be just fine with a good quality web host.
3. Poor Traffic Acquisition Strategy
You can have the finest quality content on the internet, but it’s totally worthless if you aren’t driving traffic to it. What few marketers realize is that the success of their content isn’t always rooted in the quality of the writing. Good writing helps, but it’s much more about the traffic you’re acquiring.Don’t have a formal traffic acquisition strategy? Now’s the time to develop a plan of action. This could be the single most important content marketing task you take on this year.
4. Safe Approach
Is your approach to content marketing too safe? If you’re only writing boring articles and curating generic content, then it may be time to look in the mirror and ask yourself what you’re afraid of. It’s okay to be bold and take some chances. In fact, it’s encouraged.
You don’t have to spend a fortune on content writing, but it can be helpful to outsource some of the responsibility to a reliable freelance writer. This will allow you to focus on the bigger picture content strategy without compromising on the quality of the content itself.
5. Bad Writing
As previously mentioned, writing quality isn’t the only determining factor in your content’s success. However, it does matter. If you have really poor writing, then your visitors are going to bounce at a much higher rate.You don’t have to spend a fortune on content writing, but it can be helpful to outsource some of the responsibility to a reliable freelance writer. This will allow you to focus on the bigger picture content strategy without compromising on the quality of the content itself.
Bonus infographic:
Content Marketing NO-NOs and What to Do Instead
Source: Seooneclick.
