13 content marketing mistakes to avoid on your site

Content marketing is a term that designates a long-term strategy of practices aimed at making available, regularly, to your prospects or customers, a certain number of useful or entertaining content with high added value.

 

These contents make it possible to capture the attention of your Internet users. Their aim is to educate them, entertain them and answer their problems to prove your expertise on a subject.

Content marketing practices, which existed long before the Internet through branded books or magazines, have made a real leap forward with the development of the Internet. A real lever for growth, content marketing is the key to gain visibility, notoriety and to attract new customers while improving your loyalty.

What is content marketing used for?

Content marketing is emerging as a strong digital trend in 2020, especially in the health's era crisis and isolation. In addition, according to the consultancy and Adobe Trends Digitales 2015 report , content marketing was ranked as the best marketing opportunity in 2014, at 14%, and as the second best marketing opportunity, at 15%, in 2015.:

• 20% of Internet users search the web before buying
• 27M content is shared around the world every day
• 90% of organizations use marketing content

Almost half of companies (42%) have a professional who devotes their time specifically to the development and programming of content related to their brand. This content marketing strategy gets three times more customers than Pay Per Click (PPC) adds, according to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI). Content marketing is therefore based on several objectives:

• Provide useful information for the target of the company
• Get leads
• Improve the SEO of your site
• Generate a positive impact in terms of business for the company
• Position yourself as an expert in your sector
• Build a relationship of trust with your audience and better loyalty
• Develop your website traffic and brand popularity

E-Commerce Nation helps you with your content marketing strategy

Content marketing is difficult to set up and not everyone has mastered this area; As an expert in the field, E-Commerce Nation helps you achieve better results by citing you the best practices and mistakes to avoid for your content marketing strategy.

Good practices in content marketing

Certain practices are quite widespread in the sector and used by many professionals to strengthen their digital presence and improve their conversion rates and turnover.

After having defined your buyer personas, carried out a semantic study (to get a global vision of the subjects of interest of Internet users in connection with your sector), defined your objectives and plan the contents, create these famous contents in order to put set up your content marketing strategy.

For this, the most used techniques are:

• The publication of Ebooks and case studies
• Surveys and studies
• Podcast and infographics
• Templates and cheat sheet
• Organization of webinars (video events) or physical events (conferences)
• Publishing blog articles and tip sheets
• Video publication

Who are the main content marketing levers, followed by the most used means to publish them:

• Social media publications
• Distribution of newsletters

In addition, like most marketing techniques, for these to be successful, it is important to correctly follow the KPIs of your campaigns. Since content marketing is based on an ROI approach, you must follow the most important KPIs in order to optimize your customer acquisition, namely:

• Website traffic and each content
• The conversions generated
• The generated turnover
• The cost per visit, per conversion and per customer

Mistakes to Avoid in Your Content Marketing Strategy

Whatever format or formats you decide to put in place to develop your content marketing strategy, certain mistakes should be avoided at all costs so as not to lose sight of your objectives. We present to you the 7 content marketing mistakes to avoid on your E-Commerce site.

1. Produce content without setting specific goals and objectives

Like any marketing campaign, defining defined objectives and goals is important in order to implement actions. A CMI study in 2016 thus affirmed that only 37% of companies had implemented a content marketing strategy before any action.

Publishing content without having thought through at least a strategy beforehand is exactly like parachuting while forgetting the parachute (we strongly advise against it, but the sensations are there). Whether your objectives are qualitative or quantitative; you need to ask yourself the right questions:

• How many e-commerce visits do you want to generate per month?
• How many subscribers do you want to reach?
• How many conversions from content marketing do you want to reach?

By following the SMART method (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Achievable and Time-bound), set yourself quantified and defined objectives over time, no more answers like "many people" or "as many as possible".

The need to set short, medium and long-term goals has a purpose: to record useful and quantifiable data in the present, to compare it with past data to thus determine if you are improving your performance. If this is not the case, you can at least understand that your strategy is not necessarily the best suited to your business. It will therefore be necessary to change it, or even change it, in order to achieve your objectives.

It is essential to carry out an internal (customer, content produced until now) and external (competition) analysis and to set specific objectives and precisely monitor your KPIs. Also, remember to create an editorial calendar to properly promote your content and optimize your campaigns.

In short :

1. Establish a strategy and goals
2. Define your buyers' personas
3. Plan content with an editorial calendar

2. Ignoring the interests of the client

The customer must be the priority, you must not forget him, it is therefore, of course, necessary to define your target well beforehand; your content will therefore be better suited. If it is interesting to communicate about the values ​​and culture of the company and your sales force, you should not overdo it.

While a few small exclusives or behind-the-scenes news events may spark an interest in your target audience, these should never be the basis for such a strategy.

All content marketing strategies must be oriented and based on the needs and expectations of the company's customer. The goal is to understand and know the specific interests and concerns of your client. From that moment on, your content will become interesting in the eyes of your target audience and they will derive real added value from it.

Your content should not be only focused on your products and their benefits, show your interest in your customers by offering them advice and solutions related to this product or service subtly. According to professionals, it should only represent 20% of its editorial line against 80% for extended content responding to a customer problem.

Many companies make the mistake of focusing only on their product, ignoring the needs of the main stakeholder, their customer. Remember to use the tone that will appeal the most to your target and not to produce too technical content they cannot understand.

According to a study by Rapt Media, more than half of users (55%) say they are not interested in branded content because of its lack of relevance and value. This is indeed an essential element to consider when you want to set up a content marketing strategy.

3. Satisfying your customers is good, converting is better

If your content is of good quality, informative, funny and surprising, this is obviously a bonus point, but if it does not generate any conversion, then you will have wasted both time and money racking your brains to make so good contents.

While you don't have to be self-promoting at all costs, a minimum is required to hope to make this content marketing strategy profitable for your business.

4. Bet on Clickbait and forget about quality

Web content that aims only to attract as many Internet users as possible in order to generate as much traffic as possible despite having qualitative content has a name and is called Clickbait (or literally “clickbait”). Remember that even if it is necessary to publish content regularly to stay in the minds of consumers, especially on social networks, it is also necessary that this content has a positive impact on their memories so that they come back to you.

In marketing, more clicks mean more sales opportunities. It is therefore not surprising that some brands are betting on the use of so-called “Clickbait” titles and approaches. However, this practice is very damaging to the reputation of your e-commerce site, especially when it coincides with a lack of quality. This is, without a doubt, one of the biggest mistakes in content marketing.

Even if this "strategy" will bring more traffic to your site for an indefinite period, it will not be qualified and therefore will not result in more sales. Always keep in mind that quality takes precedence over quantity in content marketing.

5. Underestimating mobile users

The growth of mobile traffic has experienced a spectacular increase in recent years. According to data from MC factory, there is a 10.2% increase in the number of Internet users who connected from their mobile in 2020.

Today, more than half of online consumers use mobiles and tablets to surf the web. Not taking them into account would therefore be a mistake which could put you on the sidelines.

It would therefore be a mistake to forget about “mobile users” when designing your content marketing campaigns. First, your site should be responsive design, but not only that. Your blog and other media should also be compatible with mobiles and tablets.

An e-commerce site which is not "mobile-friendly", ie which is not ergonomic and readable on mobile, will therefore make you lose a significant number of prospects.

6. Underestimating the importance of natural referencing

Various studies have shown the importance of SEO traffic compared to Paid traffic (SEA), in fact, users are more inclined to click on organic results than on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads as they are more and more reluctant to use sponsored links and paid advertising.

Keep in mind that SEO is part of the essence of content marketing. If the natural referencing of your site is not optimal, it is because of a lack of added value by your site.

Indeed, if your strategy is not based on qualitative content, your site will not rise in the search engine results pages. Thus, you must make sure that your content respects Google's guidelines so that it can achieve an excellent position in search results and, de facto, better visibility.

Consider creating content that is long enough to improve SEO.

7. On the contrary, think only of SEO

If your content drawn from your content marketing strategy has a major interest in the natural referencing of your site and SEO optimization, your content should not be used only to gain places in Google search results, but also and above all to offer interesting and useful content to Internet users.

Be readable, your texts must not be boring and show their interest; with qualified content like these, you will have a better chance of improving your SEO because it will be shared by your Internet users.

8. Do not publish "evergreen" (timeless) content

Universality is a quality sought by all brands for their products. The same goes for your content marketing strategy content. Specialists like to focus on timeless, timeless content that "does not die".

We speak of “evergreen” content, it is characterized by a so-called “unlimited” useful life, as opposed to content based on specific dates or specific data that will be useful for a relatively short period.

The latter aims to remain relevant long after its publication. You owe it to yourself to rack your brains to come up with content that will interest your reader, no matter what time period.

9. Do not diversify your content and publish irregularly

A lot of possibilities are available to you. Diversity is also the foundation of content marketing. Bring variety and originality to attract your consumers and try to generate viral content.

10. Do not highlight Call-To-Action

Yet that's the whole point of your content and your content marketing strategy, so call-to-action must directly reach the eyes of your readers to convince them to click. Think of these CTAs as road signs to tell them where to go.

Use them to redirect your Internet users to other content you want to highlight.

11. Make duplicate content

Over 130 trillion pages were indexed by Google in December 2016, so today it is easy to find content on any type of subject. So, with so many resources, your authors draw inspiration from articles (which is quite normal).

However, using a text and without changing a single word or a turn of phrase is a method called duplicate content (and this also applies to your title tags or your meta-descriptions).

Duplicate content causes various negative effects:

• Google will penalize you by causing a loss of positioning in the search results or even bans
• You will lose all your credibility with your Internet users

12. You do not use your old content

Update your content regularly. Search engines appreciate this and also prioritize your content in search results. Allocate some of your content marketing to updating and reusing old content.

13. Forgetting to measure and optimize results

One of the most common mistakes in content marketing is forgetting to measure the results got from this practice; this fault testifies to a great negligence which must be avoided at all costs.

It is important to know everything about user behavior in the application, blog or content marketing format used: subscriptions, e-commerce visits, click-through rate, bounce rate, average reading time, etc. These data are valuable because they “tell” us about the success or failure of the strategy put in place!

But it is not enough to measure the results: they must also be optimized. For example, if some content has few visits and higher than average bounce rates, the message will be clear: it does not interest or add value to users. What to do? Don't make the same mistakes again in the future and figure out what went wrong.

The last word

In order to optimize your content marketing strategy, implement these best practices and carefully study the pitfalls and errors mentioned in this article so as not to reproduce them in the future.