Common Content Marketing Mistakes Rookie Startup Entrepreneurs Make
Content marketing is indeed one of the most powerful weapons for entrepreneurs and small business owners. In fact, this is why, rightfully, it is called “The King”, when it comes to digital marketing.
I am sure; you already have heard it. Didn’t you?
In this blog post, we are not going to discuss the very common content marketing mistakes that startup entrepreneurs and business owners every so often commit.
You would find a number of articles on the internet, which talk about the dos of content marketing. But a very few of them will tell you about the content marketing mistakes you must avoid, especially if you are a startup entrepreneur.
Being inexperienced is not a sin but knowingly committing mistakes is indeed not a good idea for a business. This is why in this post, I will tell you eleven common, yet ghastly content marketing mistakes entrepreneurs and startup owners must abstain from.
Remember, even the slightest slip-up in execution can lead to dire consequences.
So without any further ado, let’s take a look at the common content marketing mistakes that business owners must desist.
Not Investing in Producing Valuable Content
For those who believe content marketing is cheap, let me be the eye-opener for you. Bear in mind that content marketing is neither free nor it is cheap. In actual fact, you need to invest cash to get it right.
This is perhaps the most insane content marketing myth most small business owners unknowingly conceive in their minds. The reason behind this can be many – but I believe lack of knowledge is the root cause of such a fallacy.
Before you get into content marketing, you need to research a bit and understand the actual value that it can add to your business.
For most entrepreneurs, the budget becomes a huge concern, as somehow they fail to allocate the fund necessary for content marketing. For the rest, it is most likely because of disinterest or lack of knowledge.
This is why it is imperative for all SMEs to plan their digital marketing budget, keeping in mind the probable content marketing expenses. The better you become at managing your budget, the easier it will be to strategize and run holistic content marketing campaigns.
This is absolutely mandatory; since without content marketing, search crawlers will not crawl and index your website frequently, and it will fail to acquire the organic ranking and traffic you craved.
Duplicating Content from Competitor Websites
Many entrepreneurs and small business owners often go for duplicate content copied from other similar niche websites, mostly their competitors.
This is not just unethical, but at the same time, the consequences could be quite detrimental for the website and business. Using duplicate content is a direct violation of Google’s Panda algorithm.
For any startup business, this is perhaps the worst decision you will make for your company. For a brand, credibility is very important. Once your credibility is lost, no other customer will ever put their faith in you again.
Trust me; this is one of the worst content marketing mistakes that you must solemnly renounce.
In digital marketing, you always need to create original content and promote it strategically. Duplicating content from your competitors’ websites will not only put your site in the bad-book of search engine crawlers but, at the same time, in a legal suit with the competitor.
If they have the copyright reserved for the content they created, they can definitely take legal actions against you. This means you will end up in more trouble and eventually damage your brand’s reputation.
To prevent such shady content marketing practices, Google has a dedicated algorithm named Panda that can quite easily identify websites duplicating content from other similar sites.
Besides, the owner of the website that you have copied the content from can report a duplicate content issue on Google and file a DMCA takedown request. In effect, Google may permanently remove the copied content from its index, making you lose its ranking and traffic.
Digital marketing methods are getting stricter every day. Ergo, it is a must that you produce and market your original content.
Spinning or Paraphrasing Content from Other Similar Sources
Paraphrasing is contrary to the ethical practices of content marketing. This is a tendency that can often be seen with inexperienced business owners. They find it convenient to use article spinners to paraphrase a piece of content that they found from another source on the internet.
It is very easy to find a ton of content on the internet, which gives you the exact piece of information that you wish to portray in your article. However, you also need to remember that the originality of content is one of the decisive factors for the overall success of your content marketing campaigns.
The moment you use an article spinner, both the quality and originality of your content will be absent; therefore, you won’t be able to reap any benefit out of it. Moreover, at times, this can do more harm than good for your business.
While taking ideas from other related content sources is absolutely fine, you cannot paraphrase a piece of content already published somewhere. A quality piece of fresh content will always rank way better and drive more traffic compared to a paraphrased content!
So, if you wish to attract quality traffic and sway them to purchase from you, stop doing paraphrasing and start developing your original, long piece of content.
It may seem a lot of work in the beginning, but in the long run, it’s undoubtedly worth doing.
Not Analyzing Competitors’ Content Marketing Strategies
In today’s market, regardless of your business type, you are not alone; unless you sell ice in Iceland. That’s exactly why you need to analyze your competitors’ content marketing strategies.
Being in the same niche, you can learn a lot from the content marketing methods your competitors are using to lure their customers. If you want to see your brand acquiring a bigger market share, you need to come up with strategies better than your competitors.
However, trust me; this is where a lot of brands fail miserably. By just concentrating on their own products and promotions, they completely overlook their competitors’ content strategies.
After all, you need to understand that the marketplace is the same, and you are targeting the same kind of audience, perhaps with similar taste as your competitors do. Analyzing your competitors will give you a chance to evaluate their strengths and shortcomings in content marketing, and at the same time, yours as well.
Remember, the more you analyze, the more you grow!
So, as an entrepreneur, you must use every opportunity to learn from your competitors.
A humble beginning often leads to incredible destinations.
Not Understanding Customers’ Needs and Pain Points
Before you write and develop a piece of content, always ask yourself one simple question; who are you writing the content for?
It’s a very important thing that most small business owners forget while planning their content marketing strategy. And trust me; this is why they often end up producing content that barely resembles or refers to the needs of their audiences.
Remember, every piece of content you have is for your audience, and that’s why you need to acknowledge their needs and pain points. If not, they will never be able to relate to your content and thus will likely abandon it.
The lack of a loyal audience base and engagement will lead to a situation where your website will become irrelevant in the market, and no one will pay attention to the products or services you sell.
But on the other hand, if you tweak your content strategy a bit, address the real-time problems your audience might be facing, and bestow the solutions through your content, it will indeed enjoy the engagement you aimed for.
Considering All Content As Same
It is perhaps the worst content marketing mistake you could ever make for your business because it will cost you and your brand dearly.
As I mentioned earlier, lack of knowledge is possibly the biggest gap between you and the content marketing success. That’s why you need to learn about content strategies and know all the various types of content available and their different roles in content marketing.
You may have an excellent content strategy that works like a charm for your blog articles. But it doesn’t mean that you can use the same method for creating your e-commerce product page or website’s landing page content.
The landing page content is crucial for your company’s bottom line. Hence, you need to make it aesthetically attractive and psychologically persuasive to get your site visitors converted into paid customers. Similarly, when you create an e-commerce product description, you need to give as much information as possible, being short and snappy.
Copywriting, on the other hand, is focused on the paid advertising aspects of brands’ products or services. Ergo, you can’t create a full-page story while crafting the sales copy.
A press release is a written official statement of a brand about something relevant to the business and published on news or media websites. It has nine structural elements that you must include while writing a press release.
The idea is to understand the purpose of every type of content, and after that, develop and market them accordingly. This is why instead of applying the same flat theory everywhere, you need to research the types of content you can use for your brand and finally develop new approaches for each of them.
Misjudging the Value of Quality Content
It may sound quite bizarre, but in reality, a lot of startups and small business owners don’t really understand and identify the value of content. They often end up undermining the value and the effect that content marketing can leave on their brands.
It is indeed a classic content marketing mistake that most rookie entrepreneurs often make. To avoid committing this mistake of underestimating the true value of good content, you need to understand the heavenly equation between quality content, website traffic, and the overall revenue of your business.
Most brands don’t prefer creating long content; rather, they try to go for the shorter ones, completely forgetting the benefits that a long piece of content can deliver to the brand. The longer the content is, the more contextual keywords you can target naturally.
More keywords will allow you to target a greater number of audiences and attract them to your website. The more visitors you fetch usually generates more leads.
With more leads on board, you can finally increase your sales.
Once the sales numbers shoot through the roof, your overall revenue will also be super-impressive.
After all, that’s the goal! Isn’t it?
Now, you can understand how using quality content helps your business reach new heights. If you want your brand to thrive, you should never undermine the real value of quality content.
Not Understanding How Content Marketing Boosts Sales
The overall sales of your products or services depend on various aspects. But perhaps among all of them, content matters the most. The more you invest your time and money on content marketing, the better it will be for your company’s bottom line.
But how?
Well, that’s the question that most fledgling entrepreneurs don’t understand.
When a customer decides to buy something, various psychological aspects come into play. And the only thing that can influence consumers’ psychology and change their buying habits is content.
With clear, concise, and quality content, you can not only attract boatloads of potential buyers to your website, but also the content will compel them to close the deal.
Now, the more closed deals you get, the better sales report card you will attain. In this way, the overall ROI will reach new heights and can even go beyond your imagination.
For any business, the sales number is the report card that matters the most.
Isn’t it?
So, by using quality content, you can influence and persuade new and existing customers to choose your brand over your competitors!
That’s the power of content you need to harness for your brand!
Only Focusing on Producing Content without Any Strategy
Hard work is essential for success! However, hard work without the touch of a bit of smart work will never work for you.
Hence, even if you work very hard to develop quality content but don’t pay any attention to strategize the entire thing, all your efforts will inevitably go in vain.
This is one of the awful content marketing mistakes many newb small business owners make. Randomly producing a massive volume of content will never lead to success if you don’t have a meticulously planned content marketing blueprint required for it.
As I said earlier, make sure to analyze your competitors’ content marketing strategies and your customers’ needs that have not been addressed before as they should be. Based on that, you should craft content and market it where it is most effective.
With a rigid approach, your content marketing will never survive. But with the right strategy, you can even repurpose your old content and get results from it.
Over Expecting from Content Marketing in the Initial Stage
Truth be told, content marketing is not the kind of marketing campaign that can give you instant results. It might take one whole year before you yield any significant results.
If you over expect from content marketing from the very beginning and become super obsessed with checking the metrics, you will receive nothing but utter disappointment and frustration.
Trust me; this is a very common content marketing mistake that many startup owners often commit and eventually end up producing no content at all.
Do you want the remedy?
Simply avoid being impatient and set your goals with a much more realistic time frame.
Not Measuring the Content Marketing ROI
Lastly, not measuring the content marketing ROI is another costly mistake that inexperienced small business owners often commit.
After investing sufficient time, money, and other resources in content marketing, you must start monitoring the content marketing KPIs. Pit your brand against your competitors, and know exactly where your business is standing compared to the rest of the market.
If you set realistic goals to check after spending a year in content marketing, you would know whether the campaign has followed the right track or not.
From the money and resources you invested to the promotional strategies you used, from the traffic you generated to the sales volume you made, the ROI should be judged based on all these key performance indicators.
Final Words on Content Marketing Mistakes
So, there you go, the eleven most common content marketing mistakes that rookie entrepreneurs and small business owners often make.
The point is to understand the value of content for a business and do extensive researches before diving deep into it. Only then can you avoid committing these content marketing blunders that startups like you frequently commit.
If you have found this post helpful, please feel free to let us know your views in the comment section, as it will help thousands of our readers and budding entrepreneurs out there.
Till then, best of luck with your content marketing endeavors.
