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Rights or Wrongs for Content Marketing

No matter when your content is published or who you are writing for, poor content is not going to be well received.

If you are lucky, Google will simply sandbox the page or bury it on Page 49 of the search results. In all honesty, having no one read your poor copy is better than having someone read it and share it for the sake of making fun of it. In the event that your content is read, your reader isn’t going to get much use out of it. A reader who has to battle through spelling or grammar errors is going to focus more on those problems than on your overall message. Even worse, this person isn’t likely to subscribe to your email list or your online services, or choose to buy any of your products.

You hear about content marketing. You decide to do it. But pressed for time and pressured for results, you simply churn out a few blog posts, hoping that it will work. But it usually doesn’t work — at least not with the results you wanted. Instead of gaining traffic, you simply have a spent budget, tired marketers, and a disappointed executive glaring at you.

Better content will get results.

How do you improve your content? A few things should be obvious — consistent style, no typos, images, etc. But, here’s a quick process from Backlinko to help you visualise your future (better) content.

It’s called the skyscraper technique: Find great existing content and make it better. In other words, improve on the best. Boosting your content quality should be priority No. 1 for excelling in your content marketing efforts.

Your Content Isn’t Useful

A well-written article that doesn’t solve a problem or answer a question isn’t going to get a much better reception than a poorly written article gets. If someone is looking for advice on how to get rid of an ice dam and you give them information about how ice affects the gutter, that person isn’t learning from you how to get rid of the ice dam.

Sure, it’s nice that you have explained why the problem exists and detailed the consequences of not taking care of it, but you haven’t answered the reader’s question. This person now has to search elsewhere for that information, which means you may have lost a sale or the chance to build a relationship with this individual.

How do you improve the usefulness of your content? This requires getting in the head of your users, identifying the questions that they are really struggling with, and answering those questions directly with your content.

You’re selling instead of teaching

The focus of content marketing is to educate first and sell second. Ideally, you don’t mention yourself or your business until the call to action at the end of the article or video.

The focus of #contentmarketing is to educate first & sell second

says @neilpatel

Your goal is to teach your reader how to solve a problem and who to reach out to for help. If readers or viewers want to know how to change a car battery, they should know how to do so by the end of the article or video. Your goal is to have people share your content to help you or your client look like an expert who gets paid to perform related services or sell related products.

You don’t come off as an expert on the subject

When creating content for the purposes of marketing a product or service, you have to know what you are talking about. If you read an article about horse back riding and the author mentioned how they would help you hit more horses, would you trust that source? (The answer to that question should be no.)

Therefore, you have to take great pains to make sure that you know what you’re talking about and seem credible to your audience. If you can’t do that on your own, it may be good to work with an outside source who can.

You don’t know what you want the content to achieve

Do you have a concrete plan for what you want a specific piece of content to do for your company?

For instance, you should know if you want your latest video to go viral through social media or whether it will be fodder for a landing page. If viral is the goal, you may need to create a video that’s more upbeat or vibrant that will get people thinking and talking about that content and sharing it with ease. If the content is meant for a landing page or a corporate site, you may focus more on selling yourself or what you have for sale.

Your content isn’t evergreen

Evergreen content is anything that provides a basic overview of a topic or provides information that is just as true 10 years from now as it is today. An example may be an article about Earth that says it is the third planet from the sun and it takes 365 days to complete an orbit. These facts won’t change and are accurate whenever you decide to publish them. Such content is valuable because you can use it in a blog post today, an e-book tomorrow, and as part of a webinar or as social media content a week, month, or year from now.

Evergreen content allows you to market to your customers and possibly increase revenues without having to spend any time or money on new marketing materials.

Your content isn’t ideal for your audience

When creating content with the ultimate goal of marketing a good or service, you have to know who your audience is. Understanding and targeting your audience is crucial to a successful content marketing campaign.

Your content isn’t optimized to your target social channel

Marketing your content on social media is a great way for it and yourself to gain exposure. However, no two social media channels are the same. Those who use Twitter tend to like to share links or have the information condensed to a basic overview. Those who use Instagram want content that they can “like,” comment on in depth, and share with their friends who may have similar interests.

The audience on Twitter and Instagram may vary wildly from what you will find on LinkedIn or other professional networking sites. While you may be able to get away with snarky or edgy content on your Twitter account, you may want to maintain a more professional tone when using a social media site catered more toward professionals.

You aren’t using SEO to enhance marketing efforts

Too often, content marketers and SEOs are at odds over how their disciplines mesh. SEO is what will help drive traffic and decrease the cost of customer acquisition efforts. However, SEO is more than just using keywords or phrases in the hopes of landing on the top spot in the SERPs. In addition to knowing which keywords you are targeting, you have to use them consistently throughout your page, which includes using them in title tags and in paragraph headings.

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