Content Marketing Mistakes Small Businesses Need to Watch Out for

How do you make sure you’re promoting your small business most effectively?

One of the most crucial ways is to keep your marketing campaign current, if not ahead of the curve. From there, you'll need a solid strategy. And the one that you seriously need to consider is content marketing.

In today's fierce competition, more than 70% of savvy marketers are relying on content marketing. And 78% of companies have a team of one-to-three content specialists. From blog posts to explainer videos, marketers create engaging content to attract more audiences and hopefully make them convert. However, there are some common mistakes that many of them make that can cripple their marketing ROI. Here’s what you need to know.

1. Not Researching Target Audiences' Preferences

When it comes to content marketing, it all comes down to what your target audience wants to see — it's not what you want to share. No matter how brilliant your content ideas, if it does not resonate with your target audience values, it'll get you nowhere.

By creating content that matches their preferences, it'd be much easier for them to relate and engage with it. In turn, this will tempt them to share the content throughout their network, which boosts your visibility. Therefore, it’s crucial for a small business owner to understand who your audiences are and what kind of content they're excited to see.

2. Focussing Only on a Single Type of Content

Content marketing is so much more than plain text blog posts with a few images. There is still a bunch of more engaging, affordable content that your small business can create instead of sticking to one type of content, including:

• Infographics
• Checklists
• Videos
• Ebooks

However, constantly pitching ideas to produce new content is sometimes too painful, especially for small businesses that have a small content marketing team. In this case, you can repurpose your content into different formats. For example, if you've been creating blog posts content, you can turn them into infographics or e-books that would get even more shares on top of their original post.

3. Ignoring the Power of a CTA

Another content marketing mistake that many marketers make is forgetting to include a call-to-action (CTA) on their published content. You can create an engaging and valuable blog post, but if you don’t tell the readers where they should go next, then you’ll lose an opportunity to convert them into customers. So, what’s the point of driving inbound traffic without a clear CTA or pushing them to convert?

Adding a well-placed CTA button to article templates can increase revenue by 83% in one month. It helps you to encourage the audience to perform your desired action. This way, you can achieve your content marketing objectives seamlessly. What do you want your audience to do after they see your content? Do you want them to visit your website? Or do you want them to sign up for your newsletter?

4. Not Accounting for SEO

SEO can seem to be a complex and foreign landscape for small businesses. In fact, including it in content marketing can higher content rank in the search engine, making it a lot easier for people to find it. There’s at least 40% of small businesses confident in their SEO activities. And 48% of them leverage an SEO strategy on their content marketing.

Search engines drive ten times more traffic to a website than any other marketing channel. This point makes it clear that investing in SEO should be one of your top priorities when trying to grow your small business with a content marketing campaign.

5. Not Keeping Track of Your Team’s Performance

Content marketing isn’t all about creating content and publishing it. It’s also crucial to understand how each of them is performing. Without keeping track of the performance, you won’t be able to tell which content works best and which doesn’t.

In essence, you need to make sure to review the content marketing performance with your team. If one content is performing better than expected, then you should double down on that specific topic or tactic. By all means, monitoring and tracking your content performance can help you understand what kind of content your audiences like the most and least. 

Final thoughts

Content marketing strategy isn’t rocket science. But, there are still some of the best practices and possible pitfalls that you should know to ensure that it works effectively. Get them wrong, and your content marketing strategy can be more hindering to your small business than profiting.