The Do’s and Don’ts of Content Marketing

Content marketing can be defined as marketing that involves creating and sharing content such as blogs, videos, and social media posts that help stimulate interest in a product or service. Of course, sales and or revenue is the ultimate goal, and content marketing can help accomplish that, but your marketing content generally shouldn’t consist of sales-related material. For example, a cleaning company’s content marketing piece might be a blog post naming the most common places you might miss in your home when cleaning. 

Great content is helpful, relevant, and shouldn’t feel like a sales pitch. It should be authentic and add value to your brand, reinforcing that your company or product can be trusted and establishing you as a leader in your space. In this post, we are going to break down some of the top do’s and don'ts of content marketing. 

The Do’s of Content Marketing 

Make Your Customers the Priority

Content marketing should be customer-centric, and any piece of content that you put out in the world should be focused on helping or informing your customers. When you’re in the market for a new product or service, are you likely to choose a company that only focuses on what you can do for them, and not the other way around? Instead, provide the customers with useful information or advice that can help them identify and solve a problem they are having. 

Quality over Quantity 

Pumping out content for content’s sake is not helpful to your online growth or your prospects. Focus on producing quality content. It’s more beneficial to produce one or two pieces of quality content per month than ten mediocre pieces. 

Set SMART Goals 

If you’re unfamiliar with SMART goals, they are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. If you aren’t setting goals for your content marketing pieces, there is no way to know if they are helping. An example of a non-SMART goal is that you want to see growth in your company. A SMART goal is that you would like to publish six pieces of quality content in the next three months and see a 10% increase in lead generation at the end of that same time period. 

Interact and Engage

This “Do” applies mostly to social media, but you should always be interacting and engaging with customers and prospects. Social media is one of the best places for these interactions to occur. Social media is a perfect opportunity to have a 1-to-1 conversation in front of many. And believe us when we tell you your audience is watching. If a customer engages with you, always reply promptly and offer more information and/or a way for them to get in contact. 

The Don'ts of Content Marketing 

Forget a Call-to-Action 

Forgetting a call-to-action is a big no-no in the content marketing world. In fact, every piece of content you publish should have one simple goal - or call-to-action - in mind. Getting your reader to take that action is your SMART goal as a marketer. Call-to-actions can appear throughout your piece and are a way for the customer or prospect to complete the desired action, like setting up an appointment. Yes, you want to be helpful and relevant to your readers, but you also have a job to do. And if you’re forgetting to include a call-to-action, you might be missing out on opportunities.

Create Duplicate Content

Not only does duplicate content make you look lazy, but is not well-liked by King Google. Creating duplicate content can cause your rankings to drop tremendously and all your hard work crafting content is lost.

Forget to Be Original 

If your content isn’t original or it’s been done hundreds of times by others, it’s not going to help out with your online presence. The internet is a busy place, and it’s not difficult to get lost in the sea of content. Pro tip: When brainstorming content ideas, do a quick Google search to see what else is out there before beginning your piece. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with your content, you just have to put a fresh spin on it. (See what we did there?) 

Be Aggressive 

Everyone is selling something these days, and many people aren’t interested in listening to what you have to say if you make it obvious that your goal is to make money off of them. Don’t be aggressive in your content marketing pieces or make the reader or user feel like they have to do something. A prospect will be much more inclined to buy from you if they feel like they are the ones making the decision and aren’t being forced. 

Make Sharing Difficult

You want your prospects and customers to be able to easily share your content, getting more eyes on it, and ultimately leading to more conversions. To make your content easily shareable, be sure your link isn’t a bunch of jumbled letters and numbers and relates to the piece. Encourage your followers to share your content on social media. Unless you’re creating gated content, you want it to be easy for users to share. 

While there’s no way we can cover all of the Do’s and Don'ts of content marketing, we are happy to be sharing our top pieces of advice. Have questions? Contact the DofM.