Avoid These Rookie Marketing Mistakes To Get New Clients Faster

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Most website owners agree that posting unique content is a reliable tactic for improving sales. It enhances a brand’s authority in its market niche. Posting informative blog posts draws numerous readers, which in turn boosts a website’s SEO.

When it comes to using content as a marketing strategy, it’s important to learn one important principle. The desire to write something new doesn’t mean that people will read it. There are plenty of website owners publishing new articles at a tremendous rate, but this content often fails to yield the expected improvement in sales.

Below are seven mistakes that affect the success of using content as a marketing strategy.

1. Targeting The Wrong Audience

Business owners share their articles on several platforms to advertise their products or services. Potential customers learn about the brand’s history, the range on offer, and the way the company differs from competitors. Articles play an important role in the sales funnel, because they help potential customers make informed decisions when purchasing new products or services.

It’s common for new website owners to use catchy statements that brand them as experts in their respective niches. There’s nothing wrong with this strategy, because it helps your target audience remember your brand.

However, some marketers tend to shoot first then aim later. Always do thorough research on who exactly your target market is. Use attributes such as age, gender, lifestyle, and tastes to help you identify your potential customer.

2. Lacking An Edge Over the Competition

Identifying the right target audience will help you to come up with a content diversification strategy that’s relevant to your audience’s needs. Narrowing down your potential market helps in discovering unmet needs. You can address the challenges using engaging articles that show clients how your products bridge the market gaps.

There’s a tendency for some business owners to divert their potential clients’ attention towards newly launched products, instead of the actual brand. It is logical for a business owner to create a lot of hype, in order to arouse curiosity that will push the target market into purchasing a product or service. While this principle holds water, you should also remember there are other active competitors producing similar products.

To create a lasting impression, a marketer should promote their brand’s unique selling points. As a business owner, it’s your responsibility to make your target market understand the advantages they stand to gain by being your customers. One way of doing this is by publishing educational content on why you're best suited to meet the customer's needs.

Most prospects end up choosing a brand’s rival if they don’t see what else they stand to gain after purchasing a product or service.

3. Lacking A Content Marketing Strategy

A content marketing strategy is a document that clearly explains your content research and publication schedule, in order to keep readers engaged. Marketers rely on content marketing strategies to determine suitable time intervals between blog posts. If you post a lot of articles at once, you may run out of content after a couple of months.

On the other hand, posting an article once every two or three months does little to boost a website’s traffic or sales revenue. Even frequent visitors may get tired of visiting a website that appears dormant. Low web traffic affects a website’s SEO ranking as well as sales. Owning a content marketing strategy helps marketers strike the right balance between keeping readers engaged, and sustaining anticipation for upcoming blog posts.

Do you need help creating a content marketing strategy for your business? Get in touch with seasoned experts at freelancer.com.

4. Publishing Content That’s Not Optimized For SEO

When you want to learn how to install a projector on a laptop, you’ll probably go to Google and type “how to install a projector on my laptop.” Google then displays a list of articles based on the appearance of your keyword in the article.

But how do Google and other search engines identify keywords in articles published online?

Search engines rely on software applications known as spiders to explore the entire internet, gathering information that ends up in the engines’ databases. When the spider visits your website, it gathers information on the article’s title, keywords used to describe the content, and descriptive tags used to categorize the post.

Marketers who are ignorant on proper SEO content formatting end up placing keywords in the wrong areas, or using them excessively. It’s also wrong to leave your blog posts as “Uncategorized”, because search engines do not rank uncategorized content in their results pages. Another SEO mistake is the failure to include subheadings in published articles.

5. Ignoring Social Media Websites

When it comes to promoting newly published posts, most marketers prefer using email lists. New visitors who sign up for a website’s membership or subscriptions provide their email address in order to receive new content. Email lists are popular because they help business owners establish long-term relationships with their members.

Facebook and Twitter enable businesses to reach out to new customers through powerful native advertising features. Business owners can retain both potential and converted clients using Facebook groups and pages. Twitter has a dynamic feed that displays numerous tweets at the same time. Both Facebook and Twitter have a “Share” button that allows users to circulate published content.

Any business that lacks an active Facebook page and Twitter account is clearly ignorant about the tremendous power of social media. Forbes Magazine reported that Facebook had a total of 2 billion members as per June 2017. Twitter comes in second with a staggering 328 million active members.

6. Shallow Analysis On Audience’s Reaction To Published Content

Thanks to advancement in SEO technology, website owners can obtain detailed reports on their target market’s characteristics and behavior. You can also learn about the highly used keywords in a particular industry. Successful content marketers rely on SEO analysis tools such as Google Analytics and Moz to help them identify the keywords used by thriving industry rivals. This helps them maintain good search engine rankings.

Relying on analytical tools helps create effective content writing strategies. Analytical reports display the most popular keywords visitors to your website typed in the search query. By gathering a list of these keywords, you can create engaging and informative articles with the aim of multiplying incoming traffic to your company’s website.

SEO analytics also display site traffic reports on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. You can gauge the appeal of newly published content by analyzing the changes in web traffic since the date of publication.

Learn how you can write engaging content using these six powerful tools.

7. Using the wrong tone for different target markets

The tone of your writing determines how potential clients view your brand. Most companies that rely on blog posts to promote their products or services use conversational tones in their published articles. A conversational or friendly tone lets the marketer connect with their audience on a personal level.

The ambient nature of both Facebook and Twitter encourages marketers to adopt a casual demeanor when interacting with potential customers. Business owners who share content that’s written in a friendly tone usually experience high readership and conversions. Without doing a thorough analysis of your target market, it’s difficult to know their preferred way of communication.

LinkedIn is a social media platform for professionals. If you’re planning to promote your articles on this site, it’s advisable to present your content in a formal tone.

In a nutshell

Failing to plan is planning to fail. The first step to planning a successful content marketing strategy is to understand who your target market is. Once you have the facts right, you can rely on the seven solutions provided above to improve your sales and SEO using content marketing. Content marketing is the writing and publishing of informative articles that converts readers into actual customers. 

Sharing is caring. Share this informative article with fellow entrepreneurs on your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn page.

Posted 27 November, 2017

EdwardSuez

Sales & Marketing Guru

Edward is the Sales & Marketing Correspondent for Freelancer.com. He is currently based in Sydney, and is a self-confessed ice-cream fan.

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