1. Making Your Business Your Message

 

You know every aspect of your business. Everything from last quarter’s profit margins to how each customer interacts with your company. Knowing everything about your business is what makes you and your business so successful. However, that knowledge is what makes you terrible at creating content, and you should be the last person that should implement a marketing strategy.

Your clients want content that matters to them. First, you need to understand the problems your customers have so that you can provide them with information about your products and services in a way that educates and engages them. This will allow you to create content that helps your customer’s business and its success, not yours.

This long process of identifying your customers and what problems they’re facing is called inbound marketing. “What solutions do you provide that will help the person you’re speaking to? This one simple question can set you up for digital marketing success.”

2. Not Knowing Your Buyer Persona

 

A huge content mistake that businesses make is not understanding or getting to their buyer persona. The first step in understanding your buyer persona is completely understanding your ideal client so that you can create informative and entertaining content that matters to them.

To truly gain trust from your customers is to answer their questions and solve their problems. You can do this by blogging, providing content offers, or providing case studies. By sharing your expertise, you’re utilizing inbound marketing and building your company into an industry expert.

3. Seeing Your Competition as an Obstacle

Your competition isn’t an obstacle to overcome but an opportunity to create new ways for growth and differentiation. You should use your competition to analyze what they’re already doing and how you can create a better digital strategy. Start with scouting their website by evaluating the ease of use, colors and fonts, and whether they’re offering solutions to their clients’ problems.

While you’re evaluating their website, take note of the type of content they’re offering. Do they have FAQs, eBooks, blog posts, whitepapers, or case studies? How often are they publishing content and what topics are they discussing? Finally, investigate their social media platforms, and look through their posts, followers, and engagement.

With all of this information, you can look at what’s working and what’s not. Use this to incorporate into best practices for your marketing and content strategy. Keep in mind that you have something great to offer your customers. Use every obstacle as an opportunity to grow your business.

4. Not Knowing Where Your Customers Are in the Buyer’s Journey

 

A crucial part of inbound marketing is knowing where your prospective customer is in the buyer’s journey and aligning your content to each stage. Unlike in the past with traditional marketing, the buyer now holds all the power. The buyer’s journey is the process of a person or business making a purchase; from the time they have a problem or need all the way to after the purchase when they choose to review a product or buy from that company again.

In the awareness stage, the buyer has identified a problem they have. Instead of promoting a product-based solution, educate them with answers and data to help solve their problem.

Next is the consideration stage. At this point, your potential customer has determined their problem and have decided to pursue a solution. Don’t make the mistake of selling your company. Instead, provide information to prepare buyers for the final stage, the decision stage.

In the decision stage, make your potential buyer happy. They’ve already decided they want to purchase a particular item, so provide them with product comparisons, case studies, and customer testimonials.

5. Not Knowing Best Practices for Your Online Presence

When you first create your overall digital media plan, you need to know what, where, and when to post your content. The ‘what’ to post is the type of content you’ll be posting. This should be tailored to your buyer persona. Each post needs to matter to your audience. If it doesn’t, don’t post it.

When deciding where to post, consider where your competitors and buyer persona are. If you’re business is material handling, there’s no need to be on Pinterest, your audience wouldn’t be on that platform, but they’re definitely on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.

When to post depends on your audience and each platforms’ algorithms, which requires some analyzing. This will take some time and research. To get you started, check out this quick-start guide.

 

There you have it. Those are the 5 common digital content mistakes, and how you can fix them so that you can start seeing digital marketing success. If you’re still feeling overwhelmed, that’s what we’re here for. Feel free to contact us for more information’