5 Content Marketing Mistakes That Are Costing You Customers – Part 1

Content marketing is one of the best ways to attract potential customers or clients.  It gives your brand the opportunity to deliver value.  Quality content created correctly will drive a lot of organic traffic to your website or product offering. It does, however, take a lot of time to create.  With such an investment, you want to make sure that you’re doing it correctly and with your best interests in mind.

Lucky for you, I’m  going to cover the mistakes I see a lot of small business owners make so you can avoid them and develop a strategy that gets you results.

Let’s dive right in.

Mistake #1 – Not Having a Strategy

Beginners in the space (and even so called “experts”) often make this mistake.

They think, “Let’s write this piece of content and hope something happens.”

This is all wrong.  You need to discover the best way to captivate and deliver value to your audience and prospective customer/client.  To do this, you need to know what topics you’re going to cover and why they are relevant to your business.  Instead of focusing on targeting certain keywords, prioritize an entire topic cluster and then build around it.

Each topic cluster is composed of Pillar Content and Cluster Content. Pillar content is content that contains a wide range of keywords that you want to rank for.  To surround this content, you would write cluster content that thoroughly discusses these keywords that you would find on the pillar content page.  To simplify the strategy, here’s exactly what you need to know:

• The Pillar Content should link to all cluster content once
• Cluster content should link to pillar content once
• Cluster Content, where applicable, should link to other pieces of cluster content

Of course, when writing content you should always follow the best practices of SEO to ensure that you’re following the guidelines set forth by the algorithms.

Mistake #2 – Not Knowing Your Audience 

One of the toughest parts of business is defining your audience and knowing exactly who they are.  This takes a lot of trial and error to find out who is willing to purchase from you and who isn’t so you can double down on the former.  However, it’s still an issue that many businesses don’t know who their audience is even after numerous attempts to define it.

To really find your audience, you need to develop an Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP, and only focus on your best customers so you’re as specific as possible.  To develop the profile, focus on developing their persona and their journey of what led them to you.  Even better, ask your best customers these questions and then develop a story around their answers.  This way, you can answer the who, what, when, where, why, and how of their pain points and how to better serve others like them content that they want to consume.

Check out part 2 of this article for the final 3 mistakes you want to avoid.  Mistake #3 will save you a lot of time and effort.