Content marketing is one of the most effective mediums to turn your potential clients into loyal customers. Businesses have started investing a considerable amount of time, money, and effort into creating high-quality content that is designed to improve their image and promote their values.
One of the most important channels to distribute a brand’s content is undoubtedly social media. Yet at the same time, social media is much more susceptible to improper content marketing. Let’s take a look at five content marketing mistakes that have an adverse effect on social media campaigns.
Not Understanding Your Target Audience
One of the central aspects of a successful marketing strategy is an in-depth understanding of your potential customer. If we lack insight in this department, any attempt of marketing your product or service is more a spray-and-pray approach, rather than a calculated strategy, which, in effect, is very damaging to a business’s overall success.
Misunderstanding your buyer persona will often result in creating the wrong content. This one of the content marketing mistakes that can be detrimental to your brand.
Another critical issue associated with a poor understanding of your audience is including irrelevant calls-to-action that simply aren’t compelling to a specific audience. For example, different generations have different values. While there’s a small difference in age between millennials and Gen Zers, they are almost polar on specific issues, which makes it relatively complicated to create content that will be equally enticing to both age groups.
Don’t make the mistake of misidentifying or misunderstanding your target audience.
Choosing the Wrong Platform
Once you’ve established who your average customer is, you need to establish what’s their preferred social media platform. This doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking as most social media sites publish their user demographics regularly.
It is essential to ensure that your brand, your product, and your social media presence are aligned, they need to have a common denominator — your audience.
Major content marketing mistakes can start here. If you’re targeting seniors, for example, you wouldn’t use Snapchat or Instagram where the audience is considerably younger, would you?
Lack of Authenticity and Transparency
One of the central aspects of a successful social media campaign is trust, which is commonly established via good content. Businesses that create content that is authentic and helps the brand be transparent will be head and shoulders above the competition.
Unfortunately, we’re currently in the middle of an era defined by distrust for corporations and marketing departments. As published in the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, less than 50 percent of Americans trust corporations, which is less than it was in 2017.
Failing to promote an authentic image will most certainly result in low ROI’s on your social media campaigns.
So what are the crucial features of the content that promotes authenticity and transparency?
- Being open about your prices and how your products/services are priced
- Being open about what your clientele thinks about your products/services
- Having a higher mission than just making a profit and create content that supports it
- Creating customer-centric content by focusing on value and not advertisement
Ensuring content meets one, if not more than one of these bullet points will help your brand avoid making any major content marketing mistakes.
Sleeping on User-generated Content
While user-generated content is by no means a new phenomenon, many businesses are still unaware of its importance and the benefits it can leverage the organization’s image. UGC is somewhat different from other marketing approaches because it is designed to peruse the images, videos, reviews, and articles created by customers and followers. More importantly, UGC is a great way to promote an authentic image on social media.
Allowing your customers to become one of your contributors allows you to put them in the limelight, while also showing that their opinion matters greatly to your business.
Showing other customers that you aren’t a greedy, revenue-driven corporation will, in effect, improve engagement, grow trust, and, as a result, improve sales.
Relying on the Wrong People
Content creating is very complicated. This is why businesses often delegate this type of work to seasoned professionals.
It’s essential to screen writers very diligently. Your marketing strategy can’t afford to have a passable content creator; therefore, it’s imperative to invest the necessary time, effort, and, most importantly, money in order to have the right person channel your brand values into the content you publish to your social media.
It’s also important not to work with too many writers or video editors at the same time, due to stylistic differences and the discrepancy between how they understand and apply your style guide, along with how they broadcast your brand values. In effect, this inconsistency can have a crippling impact on your social media marketing efforts and is one of the content marketing mistakes that can hurt the most.
Content marketing has many ins and outs. Being unaware of them can cause you to undo all the hard work your organization has put into its social media presence over time.
By avoiding these five content marketing mistakes we mentioned above, you’ll safeguard your social media campaigns from failure.
The original version of this article was first published on V3Broadsuite.
