The 10 Deadly Sins of Content Marketing

1. You are a copycat

Solutions:

• Create original and authentic content that is tailored to the needs of your audience.
• Don’t focus too much on keywords. Your content should be produced for your audience and not for search engines (search engines actually like that too!).
• Be creative and think about your audience‘s habits.
• Use your own expert knowledge as a source of inspiration.
• Join online discussions on social media to find out what your audience is looking for and/or what your audience is struggling with.
• Ask your existing customers, they know their pain points and challenges best.
• Spark new ideas by applying design thinking methods.

2. You focus on vanity metrics

Solutions:

• Choose a single north star metric for your organization (revenue, app downloads, donations, etc.)
• Implement the OKR method to set goals in your organization.
• Focus on the 20% of your prospects/clients which deliver 80% of the results.
• Foster authentic relationships with your prospects.
• Focus on ROI & your business goals instead of reach or the amount of followers and likes.
• Learn how to interpret attribution reports and how to use different attribution models in your analytics tool.

3. You focus too much on BOFU

Solutions:

• Produce content for every stage of the buyer‘s journey.
• Offer high-quality educational content in different formats.
• Warm up your prospects, support them on their individual journey.
• Don’t see customers as an output, but rather in the center of all your activities.

4. You are inconsistent

Solutions:

• Set up editorial guidelines (tone & voice, message architecture).
• Create a controlled vocabulary and share it with your team.
• Have a clear process for content production, quality checks & publishing.
• Work with an editorial plan (spreadsheet or kanban board) and make it achievable.
• Stick to the plan, even if you don’t get results within the first weeks or months.

5. You focus on one channel

Solutions:

• Channels like social media should be the vehicle for your content.
• Focus on owned channels, don‘t become dependent on paid channels.
• Diversify your channels, follow your audience and not the latest trends.
• Understand channels, but don’t become too blindfolded.

6. You create content without distributing it

Solutions:

• Always share your content in groups, comments, social media, etc.
• Use a tiny bit of your media budget to promote your content (paid ads).
• Think holistically, don’t see performance marketing separated from content marketing.
• Don‘t forget about content recycling!

7. You write for yourself

Solutions:

• Start with personas (even a 5-minute persona can help).
• Spend more time on audience research.
• Emphasize with your audience more (talk to your prospects & clients).
• Help your audience to solve their challenges and problems.
• Follow a data-driven approach (use Google Search Console).

8. You spam your audience

Solutions:

• Provide high value in every step of the buyer‘s journey.
• Build relationships with your prospects.
• Find the right pace for your audience (especially for emails).
• Be patient.

9. You don’t have a clear strategy

Solutions:

• Tie content marketing to your business goals (OKRs are a great tool again).
• Each content piece should be linked to a goal and have a purpose.
• Analyse the data you collect regularly, at least every week.
• Make your goals SMART. 
• Create a dashboard for content marketing (you can use Google Data Studio for free).

10. You are blogging all day long

Solutions:

• Provide different content formats for the needs for your audience.
• Recycle your content in various ways. For example, use a podcast to simultaneously produce a video and write a blog post about it which is shared on social media.

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