It’s not easy to produce content that suits your audience, and the lack of a strategy and customer understanding can make all your efforts useless.
When it comes to content there are two common behaviors among brands. The first is starting to publish anything, without a strategy or schedule. The reason this happens is that people think they must be active with content somehow, no matter what they’re posting. The second common behavior is having a content strategy but thought from a business perspective, producing content that seems to be targeting the business interests only.
Some common mistakes in content marketing
Quantity over quality
What happens when a business starts creating content just for the sake of posting on social media or blogs?
Instead of educating or informing the audience with content that responds to their needs, you overwhelm them with stuff they’ve already seen everywhere. There’s so much content around the internet that the last thing you want to do is re-propose the same content that’s been seen several times already. This will lead customers to unfollow your social media profile and get a bad perception of your business.
Trying to hack the algorithm
Another common behavior I’ve seen in brands is overposting. Many tend to focus a lot more on hacking the algorithm of each social media - which by the way keeps changing every time - instead of focusing on providing a few pieces of content, but of great quality.
The consequences of this are not only lower engagement, but also the risk to be labeled as an annoying or not interesting brand, and you don’t want that.
Self-praising
No customer is interested in reading how awesome you are if you cannot explain how you can fulfill their needs or solve their problems. If you decide to post some self-praising pieces of content, make sure it doesn’t occupy more than 10% of the schedule. It’s great to talk about your achievements but that shouldn’t be the only thing you talk about.
Self-praise is no recommendation.
How to create a content strategy: Digithy’s go-to content planning
I’ve put together a couple of suggestions to start with when you create your content marketing strategy for your brand.
Customer-first
First of all, forget your needs and your wishes. Keep in mind what you’re offering, and focus on the customer.
We explained previously why it’s important to get to know your customers before starting any kind of marketing move. In particular, we focused on a 5-steps guide to getting to know your customers and why you should use empathy in your marketing strategy.
It’s time to take those learnings and put them into practice.
Empathy is key
Think about the reasons why your audience might be interested in your product or service. In particular, think of a need they’re trying to fulfill or a problem they’re trying to solve. Then get back to the questions from your customers.
Your content should be merging the questions from customers and common problems, with your product or service and what they can provide.
Quality over quantity
Forget about the algorithms for a moment and focus on the quality of your content. If you decide to post 10 times per week, are you able to create quality content that is interesting for your audience? A good way to evaluate your content plan is by dividing it into content categories, and then ask yourself if each of those categories responds to the audience’s needs or if they help your customers.
Be as objective as you can in this process.
If you see that you could exclude some pieces of content because they don’t respond to educational content, need or help, remove it from the strategy and consider posting less instead.
Plan before, and plan long-term
If you’re willing to be consistent, you’ll need to plan your content in advance. When thinking of how to create a content strategy, make sure you have all the different categories in place and put the pieces together in a content schedule, so that you know which piece of content needs to be created, and when.
It’s also important to know that content is not something you create today and sells tomorrow, so when you start make sure you aim for a long-term content strategy.
This part of how to create a content strategy is just a start
These were just a couple of simple suggestions that we could provide if you're thinking about how to create a content strategy. Needless to say that you’ll need to test your content and see how it works, analyze it, and improve based on the results.
We’ve created an editable Social Media Strategy Templates eBook that can guide you through these first steps, you’ll just need to download it and fill it with your schedule.
If you need help on the way, let us know and we’d be happy to provide you with a free consultation.