4 Ways You May Be Sabotaging Your Content Marketing Strategy

If there’s one thing I see when I speak to marketers it’s that they have the best of intentions. Nobody falls asleep on the job (usually the job is more related to lack of sleep). Everybody wants to see their efforts succeed.

But good intentions and success, unfortunately, don’t always go hand-in-hand. There are a lot of inadvertent mistakes that marketers make with regard to their content marketing. Check out the list below for a few of them:

1) Changing your KPIs too often.

Often, marketers establish a few goals, and if they see those goals are under-performing, they may change them and opt to go with something more incremental, or less business-oriented. The result is that the more challenging goals – even if they yield the best ROI – often become neglected. You should continue striving even for the most challenging goals. If you keep on moving the goal posts, you may never reach your goal.  Try to stick to goals at least quarterly, and work your way from there.

2) Calendar first, strategy second.

It seems a lot of marketing teams live and die by their content calendars. But creating a content calendar does not count as a strategy. Of course, a content calendar is a crucial element, but it’s not the only one. So you’re creating one blog post per week. If, for example, you don’t have a strategy in place to attract the right audiences to read that post – was that truly a good use of your time?

3) Ineffective KPIs

There are certain online goals that simply don’t work as well as others. When you lock down a goal for a particular content piece or stage of the funnel ask yourself: would I take this action? A great example of this is newsletter subscriptions. This is an incredibly common KPI which very often yields no results. In fact, when looking at our customers as a whole, there’s approximately 1000:1 ratio between white paper downloads and newsletter sign-ups.

Why is this? Give it some thought – how often do you, for no reason, volunteer to get more emails in your inbox? Newsletter subscription seems like an easy go-to if you don’t have anything else that is straightforward to optimize for. But this is misleading. It may be easy to measure. Achieving it with any sort of scale – well, that’s a different matter. Very few do it with any sort of success.

4) Not optimizing for business goals.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard the phrase: We don’t want to connect our content marketing to any clear goals. Some content teams treat performance goals a bit like the plague. A few years back, that phobia was probably justified. Our research shows that 90% of content-driven user journeys are multi-touch. Without the right tools to attribute content efforts across multiple sessions, the content side often gets the short end of the stick when it comes to getting credit. But this doesn’t have to be the case. With the right attribution tools, the content team can get the credit they deserve.

At the end of the day, it’s nearly impossible to get everything right. More often than not, missteps are a result of lack of time or resources. But it may be worth taking a second look at where you’re invested.

Connecting your content to business goals doesn’t need to be so hard. If you want to find out how you can do it simply and easily, schedule a demo today.