Content is a vital part of any digital marketing strategy, emphasising your business’ status as an authority within your industry, improving search engine rankings and providing informative and helpful guidance to both current and prospective customers. However, many businesses fail to achieve the full extent of the benefits that content marketing can bring by making small blunders that are relatively easy to overcome. Here’s how to spot the most common slip-ups and more importantly how to fix them.
1. Grammatical and spelling errors
Ensuring that your grammar and spelling is in top form throughout your content is vital. Trust us when we say that people will pick up on even the most minute errors, which ultimately runs the risk of casting doubt over your authority on a particular subject. This is easily fixed in a number of ways including, proof reading your own work, asking a colleague to proof read, using a tool such as Grammarly or using a copywriter for your content requirements.
2. Your content isn’t helpful
Creating content that will not inform, guide or advise your audience on a particular subject is entirely pointless. Those that approach a content task with the thought of ‘doing it for the sake of it’ will more often than not end up with something that is of no use or benefit to anyone. Plan your content in advance so that you have a clear strategy, as well as researching trending topics, frequently asked questions and sharing relevant company news that audiences will be interested in.
3. You don’t write for your audiences
Particularly for those businesses that work in industries that can be very technical, we have seen time and time again content that is written using extremely technical language and jargon, for which someone outside of the industry could struggle to grasp the meaning of. Ensure that your content is written for those that will be reading it, find simpler ways to explain technical processes which will ultimately give readers a clearer understanding of what your business does and therefore make them more likely to enquire about your services.
4. Your content is too long or short
It is a fine balance when it comes to copywriting not to make your content too short, but also not too long. Content that is extremely short is almost certainly not going to be helpful for an audience (see point 2). On the other hand, potential customers won’t have all day to read your content, so having extremely long blogs may alienate visitors from returning to your site or sharing your content. As a rule of thumb content should be over 300 words but under 1000.
5. You aren’t optimising your content for search engines
There is no point in having a great piece of content if it can’t be found by search engines. Therefore, all content should be optimised so that search engines can firstly know that it exists, but also so that it can understand what the content is about. This can be done by completing title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags and having relevant headers that structure your writing.
6. You’re aren’t providing a mix of content
It is a common misconception that content refers solely to blog writing, but there are many options out there to spice up your content marketing plan! Blogs should form the basis of your content strategy. However, infographics, videos, quizzes and case studies can be created for increased engagement and for encouraging your audience to share your content across social channels.
These are just some of the many content marketing blunders that a business can make, but each and every one is easily overcome. Do you want to give your business’ content marketing a boost? Speak to the team at Entyce today to find out how we can help.