5 Flawed Content Marketing Approaches Harming Your Business!

Content marketing challenges.

Quantity = EVERYTHING

The conventional wisdom used to be that the best approach to content marketing was to scale production. Google rewarded publishers that posted content every day, which led many brands to create as much content as they possibly could.

Unfortunately, this resulted in the creation of a lot of thin content that provided very little value to readers. And since this content wasn’t all that professional in nature, brands had trouble building trust with readers – inevitably causing their conversion rates to suffer. Further disaster struck with the Google Panda penalty when sites like how and other publishers of high volume, low-value content lost nearly two-thirds of their traffic.

Social Media Promotion Isn’t Necessary

If you’ve ever seen the movie Field of Dreams, you probably remember the quote: “If you build it, they will come.” This quote has become stupidly famous in the content marketing profession, but the unfortunate truth is that you need to actively promote your content to create visibility for it. While organic search and paid traffic are valuable ways to draw attention to your content, they aren’t the best ways to engage with your customers.

If you want to get the most of your content and build the trust needed to earn conversions, then you must be active on social media.

Too many brands neglect their online social presence for a variety of reasons. Maybe they believe that their customers aren’t using social media, thinking that only younger or tech-savvy customers are active on these sites. The truth, of course, is that almost everyone is using social media these days and you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you aren’t.

Publish Only Concerned-business-oriented Content

That’s powerful stuff, and it’s a lesson that you should burn into your brain.

One of the biggest complaints consumers have raised is that companies that market to them on social media are too promotional. The problem can be even more common for content marketers that come from an old school advertising background and who are used to putting out messages in the form of copywriting.

All Content Should Be Long

You’ve probably read countless case studies showing that longer content pieces trump shorter pieces. As a result, many brands have started moving away from the traditional model of using 500-word articles to boost their rankings and engagement. While this wisdom is certainly applicable in some instances, there are other situations where it’s actually counterproductive. There are arguments from both sides that you need to take into consideration.

On the one hand, there are clear indicators that long content ranks better and is more engaging. One study from Moz found that content that was between 1,800 and 3,000 words long received more backlinks and ranked better in the search engines. Research from Medium shows that readers pay more attention to content that takes about seven minutes to read, which equates to pieces that are about 1,600 words.

Any freelancer would get the job done

Another misconception when it comes to content marketing is the all-too-common belief that the approach that works well for Nike or Dell will work for your brand as well. Many brands try to clone successful campaigns of businesses in totally unrelated industries, which rarely works out as well as they projected.

Unfortunately, finding the ideal content marketing approach is going to take time – there’s just no one-size-fits-all model. Every customer is driven by different factors, motivations, and interests, so you’ve got to know what makes them tick before you can even think about improving your conversions.