You’ve mapped out a content plan, brainstormed blog post ideas, and hired a great writer to create your content. You also have a distribution plan, a solid social media presence, and a powerful lead capture system.
Surely, your content marketing campaign will be a success, right?
Not always. While great content and solid distribution certainly help, they can’t always guarantee content marketing success. This is especially true if you’re making any of these 3 content marketing mistakes:
- Your site is too slow
It’s no secret that both Google and your readers prefer fast sites. A slow loading page translates into a poor user-experience, which, in turn, negatively affects your search rankings.
The impact is particularly pronounced today when more and more people are accessing your content on mobile devices. Since these mobile users don’t always have fast connections, it is crucial to make your sites quick to load. You’ll find that cutting down load time by even a couple of seconds will have a big impact on your bounce rates and rankings.
Improving site speed is a fairly complex (and technical) topic, but for starters, try doing these:
- Upgrade to a faster web host.
- Use a CDN.
- Leverage browser caching.
- Minimize redirects
- Minify JavaScript and CSS
- Optimize images and media
For a more in-depth guide, follow the guidelines in this Moz article.
- You’re not repurposing content
Try this: log into WordPress and note down the number of posts you’ve already published.
Now ask yourself: “have I extracted full value from all this content?”
If the answer is ‘no’, you need to repurpose your content.
Repurposing content is the process of creating new content from existing assets. This can mean turning a blog post into an infographic, a webinar into a SlideShare, or a series of social media posts into a Storify narrative.
If you’re already publishing quality content, you’ll find that it’s easy to create multiple assets from a single blog post. For example, a post titled “A Complete Guide to Content Marketing” can be easily turned into:
- A SlideShare presentation of essential content marketing tips
- An infographic with essential data about content marketing
- A video introducing viewers to content marketing
- A five-part email course on content marketing
If you want to get the most value from your content, it is essential that repurposing content is a key part of your marketing campaign.
- You’re not following a content calendar
The secret to content marketing success isn’t always better content or stronger distribution. Sometimes, it can be something as simple as following a strict content calendar.
The numbers don’t lie: companies that regularly publish 11+ posts every month get 6x as many leads as those that don’t follow a strict publishing schedule.
A content calendar does three things:
- It forces you to stick to a publishing schedule.
- It improves collaboration between different content creation + marketing teams.
- It helps structure content distribution.
You might have the best content marketing plan around, but if you aren’t sticking to a publishing schedule, you’ll see little success from it.
Conclusion
Content marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tactics today, but it is also one of the hardest to master. It isn’t enough to simply publish great content; you also have to master distribution, follow a fixed schedule, and repurpose existing content to maximize reach.