One of the things I have noticed about musicians is they play their songs over and over.
They create an album and spend hours practicing and recording the songs. When they are finished recording, and the album is out, they spend months and months touring while singing and playing the same songs all over again.
Do you think they ever get tired of playing those songs?
You can get some insight into that by watching interviews. Some have songs they never get tired of singing. Some may get tired of playing and singing them, but their fans still want to hear them.
The point is they don’t have the stress of coming up with new content each month. We don’t have to have that pressure either when it comes to content marketing. Times have changed.
There are, however, some content marketing mistakes I have identified by many website agencies when it comes to content marketing. Today I am going to discuss a few of them.
1. No Core Message.
Here is the problem a lot of website agencies have when it comes to content marketing. They almost always create content for other agencies and freelancers. That’s fine if that is who you are targeting.
Another issue they have, because of the above, is that agencies fail to differentiate themselves from other agencies. So, what is your secret sauce? Do you help online content creators or the business down the street?
If you help the business down the street, what makes you different? Others in your area are likely cheaper so, why should a company go with you if you are more expensive?
Take some time to figure out why. Learn what really it is that gets you going in the morning.
Determine your value proposition by deciding what you do and who you do it for. Dig in and find the benefits of working with your company.
Finally, dig into your ideal client. I am not talking demographics but the common denominator from the clients you have. To do that, you may need to interview the client.
2. Automate everything.
There is a time, and there is a place to automate things. There is no doubting this. Content marketing is hard to automate. Sure, you can automate sharing articles and content to social media, but you can’t automate responding and building a relationship.
Good articles aren’t written in 15 minutes—good articles arent written by a machine.
Podcasting takes work. Email newsletters don’t happen by themselves.
You cannot set content marketing on autopilot and forget it. This is a content marketing mistake. That is why there are scores of content marketing agencies.
You can use something like Grammarly to help with your grammar and spelling when you write, but even then, they are not perfect. I love to break grammar rules, so I have to ignore Grammarly half the time.
3. Failure to use what is recommended.
In 2020 content marketing and SEO are closely tied. It is hard to do one without the other. Most agencies will preach to their clients to create content for the sake of SEO.
I completely agree.
Agencies get too busy to write or create content. It’s kind of like the cobbler whose children have no shoes. It’s time to get shoes.
Build out a content creation process. Hire a writer if you have to.
The good thing about content marketing is that once you have your piece of content created, you can spend time repurposing it several different ways for social media.
4. Only consider one type of content.
I totally understand this one. We do what we are good at or at least what we think we can do. For most of us, that is writing.
We write every day. We are continually noting our clients’ accounts and sending emails.
Technology has made it easier too. Some people use voice-to-text to do this, and I want to try it out as well.
We can talk, though. That may be one of our most natural things to do. When we record a video to audio, we just fire up the mic and start talking.
Some are better than others.
Consider changing it up.
Here is a big list of content types from Backlinko.
The content that gets the most attention is very different content.
With the help of existing data and research, you can make an infographic.
My friend Danavir got a ton of views from creating comics.. It was s different than what anyone else was doing.
Consider changing it up.
If you make a cartoon as he did, perhaps you can turn it into an animated video.
Ask yourself this question. What is the value of the content if it gets you tons of pageviews and several contacts for business?
Wrapping it up
So, get started with your content marketing today. Those that were using it heavily a year ago are not affected by the need to cut costs from advertising because they have a built-in magnetic pull from the content they have.
Fortunately, these days you don’t have to pump out 3-4 articles a week. You can put your head down and create one solid piece each month and repurpose them into several different types of micro-content.
Next week I am going to discuss five different types of articles you might use to help keep your content calendar filled.
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