5 Errors Killing Your Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is a crucial component to your inbound marketing strategy.

Blogs form the cornerstone of any good content marketing program. By adding pages to your website and using keywords related to your business, they support your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. They also give you a great opportunity to offer helpful information to prospects in the awareness phase of their buyer’s journey.

However, when done incorrectly, blogs may derail your entire inbound marketing content strategy before it’s able to have any positive impact. To get the most out of your content marketing blog strategy, avoid the five critical errors below.

1. When?

For effective results, you need to blog regularly. A content calendar helps you ensure that your blogs are posted on a regular schedule and avoid long gaps between blogs or too many blogs in a short period of time.

If you have more than one employee working on your company’s blog, you should also indicate who is responsible for each blog post to make sure no posting dates get skipped and to avoid two employees working on the same blog at once.

2. What to say?

Generally, all of your topics should be determined well in advance of when they’re written. This allows you to boost your search engine optimization efforts and build expertise on topics that resonate with your personas.

Posting about whatever comes into your mind on any given day causes inconsistency and also makes your blogging efforts inefficient. For the best results, focus on one broad theme throughout a series of blogs and tailor your predetermined topics to those themes.

3. Who are they?

Remember the golden rule of inbound marketing: it’s not about you.

Your blog posts need to focus on your prospects and their pains. With every post you develop and write, ask yourself if it helps your prospects solve their pains. If the answer is no, you need a different post.

4. Quality?

Unfortunately, many businesses think of their blog as “just a blog.” As a result, they don’t take the time to generate quality posts.

If this is your attitude, you probably shouldn’t have a blog at all. Posting low-quality content to your website doesn’t add any value for your prospects. Plus, if you offer poorly worded posts with numerous copy errors, you actually harm any trust you’ve built with your prospects. No matter how much of an expert you are in your industry, it won’t seem that way to prospects after they read an incoherent, typo-riddled blog post.

Building trust is crucial to guiding prospects through the buyer’s journey. Bad blogs kill trust. Avoid this by hiring good writers and copy editors for your blog posts.

5. Are you using long-tail SEO keywords?

Blogging directly impacts your SEO efforts. That’s why you need to know what keywords to focus on between each topic and theme. However, it’s not enough to simply use keywords and hope search engines rank your blog for these terms.

In fact, in most cases, it’s not the blog posts you even want to rank for those keywords. While there are some instances where you may gain search engine traffic from a blog post, typically you want to use those blogs to help other pages on your site rank for your target keywords.

You’re better off having one website page you want to rank for each term. For instance, if your main source of revenue is manufacturing custom ramekins, you’re going to want to rank for the keywords “custom ramekin manufacturing” and “custom ramekin production.”

Rather than just using those terms a few dozen times in your blog posts, build a custom ramekin manufacturing page with lots of details on this service on your site. Then, when you use this term within your blogs, make sure to link back to that page.

This SEO strategy helps boost the rankings of your target pages, avoids keyword cannibalization (when you have two pages ranking for the same term, hurting the overall rank of both) and helps guide your prospects through their buyer’s journey.

Actionable Advice – If you don’t have a blog content strategy document, write one today. Start by selecting a relevant pain your prospects are experiencing that your services help solve. Then, decide how frequently you want to post blogs. Next, set dates for the posting of each blog with a predetermined blog topic that directly addresses your buyers’ pain. Once you’ve completed this document, you have a clear guide for the content you’re going to write, which helps you develop a regular schedule of prospect-focused blogs.