4 Content Marketing Pitfalls and how to Avoid Them

In a flooded market, it’s essential to know how to avoid the biggest content marketing pitfalls.

Whether you’re an enterprise-level company, a single person, or somewhere in-between, mostly everyone is in on the content marketing game these days. And why not?

You can develop a loyal audience, grow your reach, and improve sales or brand recognition with various content marketing strategies. However, since there are plenty of strategies available today, there are also plenty of ways to fail at implementing them.

But fear not: the experts here at Edgy know content marketing.

Here’s how you and your company can avoid the four most common content marketing pitfalls.

Pitfall #1: Not Producing and Sharing Consistent Content

As we have pointed out in previous content marketing articles, consistency is key. If you produce content sporadically, your audience will likely dwindle.

Due to a lack of schedule, people won’t know when to watch, read, or engage with your content. After all, humans are creatures of habit, so we fall into routines easily.

By establishing a publishing schedule, you set a routine for your audience.

They can always look forward to new content from you on this day at this time of the week. This also means consistent engagement in the form of likes, shares, and comments.

Leveraging social media sharing, in the same way, can boost things even further.

Despite the benefits of a consistent schedule, many fall into this common content marketing pitfall. You can better avoid it with a few easy tweaks to your content marketing approach.

First off, you can schedule posts on various platforms, including WordPress and Facebook. You can also implement tools such as Sprout Social, Buffer, and HootSuite to boost your scheduling game further.

By having a plan for your content, you also fall into a routine yourself. Sooner than you think, you’ll find yourself less stressed about wondering if you have content prepared because you’ll (most likely) have scheduled something already!

Pitfall #2: Not Crafting Valuable Headlines and Tags

Along with doing things like improving page speed, you need to pay attention to the small things when it comes to avoiding content marketing pitfalls.

Of course, excellent, engaging, and SEO-friendly content matters. But you also want to craft high-quality headlines and use appropriate tags and metadata.

For those of you focused heavily on SERPs and keywords, this counts for double.

A well-crafted headline and relevant tags are easy, near-instant ways to enhance a piece of content. In fact, you should look at them as a part of the content you produce.

In the age of the ever-evolving Google algorithm, this also means staying up-to-date on the latest changes and tweaks made to search engines.

Take the first step toward this research and start crafting A+ headlines and tags.

Pitfall #3: Not Leveraging More Than Just Written Content

We mentioned in a recent article that your content is your product. It can promote your business, advertise a service or item, and grow your audience. However, most people only stick to one type of medium to leverage that content.

We have several guides on how video can amplify your content marketing strategies. But to best avoid content marketing pitfalls associated with this, you’ll need to understand that video is what you should be doing right now.

Whether that’s creating YouTube content, doing Facebook Live streams, or something else, video content was king in 2019.

Many people stick to written content because they feel video content is hard or complicated. But this is not true — especially in the time of YouTube and Vimeo.

You can even leverage a streaming platform such as Twitch if you wanted to do so.

It will depend on where your audience would most likely engage with your content. Or, what sort of results you want from that content.

For a jump start on creating video content, check out this article, and get started today.

Pitfall #4: Not Learning From Your Metrics and Insights

It might sound boring, but parsing data metrics is one of the best things you can do to avoid content marketing pitfalls. It’s also mostly, if not completely free to do.

After all, Google Analytics offers a free service if you inject the code into your website. Social media platforms such as Facebook feature their own metrics tools, as well.

But more than having access to data, you need to understand and transform that data.

Without learning from that data to improve your content, you’re falling victim to content marketing pitfalls. This means, again, spending some time with your head “in the books,” so to speak.

But don’t worry: you don’t need to pour over each number and statistic. You need to focus on which metrics matter most for your brand and service or product.

Need some insight into what that might be? Edgy Labs has you covered with our content marketing metrics guide.

Read More: 10 Content Marketing Metrics Every Marketer Should Measure