Do: Understand Your Target Audience
Your target audience is the basis of your entire content strategy, therefore they need to be clearly defined and be known inside out before beginning any work.
Every business has their own desired audience, that’s why your content needs to be addressing your audiences’ passions and problems to make them interested in your services and want to share it with others.
Do: Promote Your Content
Having excellent content, ready to read is all well and good, but if you fail to sufficiently promote your content, it will seriously decrease the chances of your work being seen by your desired audience.
Posting blog posts and other content on social media is an easy, effective way of making your work instantaneously visible. Though it’s important to be mindful how and where you post your content, making sure it’s relevant to the platform e.g. hashtags on Twitter or Instagram to make sure it has the desired effect.
Do: Create Measurable Goals
Goals are important to help keep focus and are something to measure your activities against to see how successful your content marketing is.
If you are a small business there is no gain in setting an unrealistic goal, keeping your goals SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) and focusing on the individual elements will help create more powerful, effective targets.
Do: Update Your Content
Constantly coming up with new content ideas is a strain on your resources, sometimes the most effective method is renewing the content you already have.
Content marketing is an industry that is always changing, if there have been major shifts in marketing or your specific industry, revise previous content to reflect that.
Revising content requires fewer resources, keeps your audience informed, ensures your regarded as a trusted authority, and increases your SEO favourability on Google.
Don’t: Ignore Your Engagement
Interactivity is one of the many benefits that come with content marketing, as comments and interactions will increase your engagement and reach.
It’s crucial you don’t ignore interactions with your audience, if you become responsive with returning comments and sharing posts you’ll be rewarded with loyalty and conversions.
Don’t: Duplicate Content or Your Competitors
Plagiarism in any industry is strictly forbidden and that’s no different in content marketing. Though there’s no shame in taking inspiration from previous campaigns, it’s important that your content is original to avoid tarnishing your reputation to customers and others in the industry.
It’s important that you also don’t duplicate your own content, as it’s potentially damaging to your search rankings and your brand.
Don’t: Focus Solely on Sales
Though you may have undertaking content marketing to increase your sales, it’s important that your work doesn’t come across as advertising.
It’s important that you create content that offers something to the world and encourages engagement with your service without hitting your audience over the head with it.
Don’t: Have More Than One Call to Action
Integrating call to actions into content marketing is essential to make sure that you’re guiding the customer to the specific action you want them to take.
Convoluting your content with multiple CTA’s will only bring confusion on the action you want them to take, each individual piece of content should have a specific direction of conversion that’s relevant to the piece.