You’ve heard that content marketing is absolutely vital to the success of your scaling business. But all of your content marketing efforts have failed to move the sales needle in the right direction.

How is this possible?

You could be making one of four very common content marketing mistakes that can stunt your growth, or even halt it all together.

But what are these mistakes? And how can you avoid making them in the future?

This article will break down four of the most common and dangerous content marketing mistakes, showing you what you should and should not be doing while trying to grow your business.

Not Offering Value

The word value gets tossed around a lot in the business world. That’s because it is integral to the sales process.

If you’re not creating a sense of value around a product or service, there’s no urgency for your customer to make a purchase. You have to show them the importance of a product and how it will directly impact their life.

People will spend money if they can see the value in their purchase. That’s really the backbone of content marketing. You’re creating value around your company and explaining how what you are selling can be a smart purchase for your audience.

Take this example from True Blue Life Insurance.

On this landing page, you have a value statement explaining the importance of life insurance. Then, below that, you have a tool that directly demonstrates the value that you’re receiving through this company.

By stressing value to your customers, your content will drive future conversions through the roof.

Not Embracing Automation

Automation is important for efficiency in a modern workplace. That’s why there are so many various workflow analysis and automation tools out there today.

We’re not recommending that you replace all your marketing efforts with software. What we’re saying is that using modern tools can help boost your efficiency.

With an automation tool, you can save a lot of time by automating repetitive or tedious tasks. This frees up your human brain for more complicated content marketing related duties that require your complete attention.

The end result is feeling more focused and engaged, able to give your all to the tasks that really matter.

You can use automation tools to manage email marketing campaigns or schedule social media posts. Automation even comes in handy when it comes to the creation and posting of your content through WordPress.

Wordable is a great example of an automation tool that can directly impact your content marketing. When you try to paste content written in Google Docs into WordPress, the formatting is off. Without a tool, you’d have to go back and alter the code of your blog post in order to make it work.

However, Wordable allows you to import content from Google Docs into WordPress with no coding required. This saves time and energy, and allows you to churn out your content faster.

Not Using Different Forms of Content

There’s more to content than just text-heavy blog posts.

You should be taking advantage of various forms of content as part of your content marketing strategy.

For starters, you should be investing in video. Video is one of the most highly effective forms of content. People can engage with it more easily and retain more information, as opposed to a simple text-based article.

But there are more content formats out there than just text and video. Think about audio content, such as podcasts; as well as infographics, gifs, images, and more.

Not only should you be creating this content, but you should factor them into your product pages in order to engage the customer more directly.

The above image, from Joy Organics, shows the effectiveness of alternative content on a product page. You have a high quality photo of the product on the left. Then, at the bottom, you have a number of facts about the product highlighted by helpful visual icons.

Not Having a Strategy

Obviously, you need to approach your content marketing strategy...strategically. That means having a plan that is worked out ahead of time.

There are a few key elements to your strategy.

First off, you have to determine what kind of content you’re going to create. It’s always a good idea to try out different formats in order to determine what clicks best with your audience. Do they prefer shorter punchier blogs? Are they more into video content? Are they voracious readers who will devour long-form roundup style articles?

Once you know that, it’s easier to create a content strategy and target the posts that you produce.

You also have to make sure that your content is laid out in a way that is easy to navigate and understand. It’s important to create an internal web of links so that users can go from article to article easily.

It’s also smart to create a table of contents, like the one shown above from Preply.

When you’re creating longer content, like the roundup articles we mentioned before, a table of contents makes it easier for the user to skim through and determine where in the article they want to jump.

You’re also going to have to do a good amount of keyword research before you ever write your first sentence. You need to identify high-value, relevant keywords in your industry and then optimize your content around those terms.

When you know what your audience is looking for, you’re able to catch their eye through Search Engine Optimization, feeding into their wants and needs with relevant content.

In Conclusion

Content marketing can be helpful and useful for any modern business, regardless of your industry.

As long as you avoid these four classic mistakes, you’ll be able to create high-quality, relevant content that will drive users onto your website, instill a sense of value and urgency, and get conversion after conversion.