Content marketing has become the buzzword du jour: everywhere you turn, it seems like someone’s talking about how it’s the key to generating leads and converting them to sales. Without a solid guide to what to do, though, it’s easy to make content marketing mistakes that cost you customers. If you want your content marketing efforts to pay off, it’s important to follow a few rules.
1. Know Your Content’s Purpose
Generating content is important, but make sure you don’t fall into the trap of creation for its own sake. Content that’s written just so that you can say you have a lot of content on your site won’t do anybody any good. That kind of content is like the buzz of voices at a cocktail party: there’s a lot of noise, but nothing you can latch onto or respond to.
To avoid cocktail content, ask yourself what purpose each piece of content serves before you create it. You may want to make your readers laugh, teach them something or encourage them to keep trying to solve a problem. Whichever it is, keep the purpose in mind and make sure your content is relevant to your audience’s needs and what you can do for them.
2. Focus on Your Audience
It might seem obvious, but remember that your content should be about the audience, not yourself. Some businesses make the mistake of publishing personal diaries instead of blog posts. The readers do not care about how excited you are about a new product line—they care about what you can do for them. Keep the content audience-focused and people will flock to it. Write too much about you, and it can turn them off from your business forever.
3. Be Daring, Be Original, Be You!
There are millions of businesses, blogs and social media pages out there. It’s okay to get inspired by what other people have done, but don’t try to imitate it. People do business with you because of the unique value that you can provide for them. So let that uniqueness shine through every post, status update or infographic! When your content stands out, your customers will stand with you, so be original.
Follow these three rules and your content marketing campaign may really take off.
Now it’s your turn: “What’s your top content marketing rule, and how has it helped your business?”