Mike Huber works with Vertical Measures and wants to help you get to your end goal simpler and faster with content marketing. He has eight tips to help your content work better for you.
If you don’t have an established process in place, now is the time to do so. Mike discusses the journey of learning content marketing strategy using Garner’s Five-Step Hype Cycle. Mike explains content marketing is beginning to mature and that he believes it is now dropping into the trough of disillusionment.
As the process begins, people are interested in content marketing and are learning so much. However, as time goes on the work gets harder and suddenly people get overwhelmed, then begin blaming others. As you start to climb out of rock bottom, that’s when people really begin to see how content marketing is worth it
Mike’s Eight Ways to Fail at Content Marketing
Each of these ideas can damage an otherwise solid strategy for content marketing.
Your executive team is not leading the way
Everyone on your team needs to be engaged in the culture of content marketing. Content marketing must be supported from the executive branch or your strategy will fail. It is not a tactic or strategy and your entire company must understand that it is a way of life and a culture.
Not Creating Your Own Content
The people inside your company know more than anyone else about what your company should be writing about and the information you should be sharing. They know which questions your service department answers on a daily basis. Mike believes you should make it a priority for your company to get involved with content marketing and reward those who engage.
You’re Using the Wrong Kind of Strategy
Having a complete marketing strategy is important, but Mike shared that it is even more important to have a strategy that is simple to use. With a strategy that is agile and streamlined, you can create great content more quickly.
Failure to Amplify
Using any sort of promotion to amplify the reach of your content is the best way to get your information in front of the audiences that you want to reach. Mike mentioned many ways for promoting your content–which includes both paid and organic–on Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, using influencers, and press releases.
Nurturing Leads is an Afterthought
“If you have a database of email addresses and access to further nurture leads and you aren’t, you’re wasting resources,” Mike said.
Not Optimizing Your Content
Bake optimization into your process as you publish you rcontent as a best practice. Do those practices with SEO, title tags, and meta descriptions as you go. The most common SEO problems you should optimize for:
- Unintentional duplicate content
- Slow page load times
- Poor HTML
- Poorly Optimized image/videos
- Bad backlinks/not enough
- Thin content
- Not Mobile Friendly
Being Afraid to Publish Your Best Content
There are six specific areas where you should absolutely have content on your website, according to Mike.
- Price or cost–even if you can’t talk about price, talk pricing variables
- Problems and issues that exist in your industry–and how you address them
- Comparisons–who are your competitors and how you compare
- Reviews–what your former customers have to say about you
- Best/Top Features
- Resource Pages
Ideation Gone Awry
Coming up with great headlines and titles for a website is not always easy. The headlines that do well in magazines and in the newspaper, aren’t the best headlines for web. Even with the best ideas, you can still fail online.
Wrap it Up
By avoiding these ways to fail, Mike says you can create a stronger content strategy,
