Early this week I wrote about 5 Content Marketing Do’s to help you create better content and generate visitors to your website. I believe that content marketing is the backbone to any marketing strategy. When I worked at a Convention and Visitors Bureau, I created a content marketing strategy that was the pillar of our overall marketing strategy. By doing that, I was able to increase our web traffic by 35% year over year and our organic traffic by over 20%. The content on our website pages and from our blog, provided with us a stronger social media strategy, increased SEO, and better storytelling of our destination / brand.
In today’s marketing world, quality content is the best way to increase your search rankings, and gain consumers’ attention. Instead of just boosting your website stats for a day, a month or short term such as a marketing campaign that only runs in the summer, content marketing is an ongoing source of sustenance for a brand. Content is evergreen in nature, but should include a mix of niche posts / stories. Content marketing is about offering information your consumers want. You already read about the 5 Content Marketing Do’s, no we want to talk about the 5 Content Marketing Don’ts.
Here are my 5 Content Marketing Don’ts
Sound too Sales-ish
Content marketing is about telling the story. You are painting the picture of what your audience is envisioning and providing the readers with helpful information. Being helpful gets bought, because as we know nobody wants to hear how great you are. It’s okay to be promotional a little, but that offers little value to the reader and will have them leaving your site before long.
Not Publishing Content Regularly
This drives me nuts. I have seen too many Convention & Visitor Bureaus and businesses recently who do not update their blogs on a regular basis, some haven’t been updated for months. This is doing absolutely nothing. Statistics show that those who publish regularly have increased their overall website traffic. Posts do not have to be long, can be short and easy. Most CVBs go on their local radio or TV station and talk the weekends upcoming events, which means you are making talking points for yourself. Take those talking points, post them and a blog and boom, that is one blog post a week. That easy.
No Keyword Research
I am not talking about having your content fill keywords every 2 – 3 sentences. You want to find our what your consumers are typing into Google, by doing this, you can create blog topics based on those searches. Your consumer has a problem they are trying to solve or they are looking for restaurants with the best fish fry’s, either way they are typing that into Google to find the solution to what they are looking for. You are their problem solver, the solution to what they are looking for. Your content should provide consumers with answers to their questions. You can do this by looking at your Google Analytics or at your Moz report.
Only Promoting on Your Blog
Okay, this is a little drastic. Your blog has been posted to the blog page but what happens next? Simple, depending on the topic, that post should also then be on another page of your website that is related. For example, if you wrote about restaurants with the best fist fry’s, it should also be linked on the dining page of your website. You also want to have an outreach strategy for promoting said content. Don’t let great content and your efforts go to waste, develop an strategy to post the blog to all of your social channels. Remember, if your content is not time sensitive, you can re-purpose the content throughout the year.
No Defined Content Market Strategy
Content marketing will improve your ROI, but you need to have a strategy behind it to make it work. Different types of content will work better at different times of the year and on different social sites. When you are creating a post, think about how that post can be broken up for each social network and promoted. Success is having a plan behind what you publish and the right team, and brand advocates, to execute the plan. Here are my 5 Reasons Why You Need a Content Marketing Strategy.
When creating content you want to think about your audience, create content that is helpful and solves their problem, have a content marketing strategy and a promotional plan.
