Top 8 Mistakes Companies Make With Their Content Creation

Top 8 Mistakes Companies Make  With Their Content Creation

In business, the ability to showcase your experience and speak with conviction is crucial to success and growth. After all, why should anyone take you seriously if you don’t even take yourself seriously? 

With this being said, it’s clear why content creation is such a large part of company development and how it can greatly impact the lead generation and profitability of companies in nearly every industry without fail. 

Despite this, however, many companies tend to create content that is either disjointed or simply subpar in nature. This disconnect between experience and the ability to put it down on paper far too often serves as the bane of companies’ existences—and for good reason. Without quality content specific to a business’ industry, the organic site traffic marketing approach is sure to fail. 

Fortunately, by understanding the fundamentals of business content and the top mistakes to avoid, you can succeed from the start and skip the trial and error altogether. This is why I have compiled this list of the top mistakes made by marketing clients prior to working with companies like Tier Level Digital Marketing as well as how to avoid them below. I hope this will help you to move in the right direction with your content even before choosing to work with a team of content creators to expand your brand and increase your profits.  

The Fundamentals of Business Content Creation

When it comes to business content creation, it’s more or less an intricate play built up of skill, passion, choreography, and engaging subject matter. Think of your product or services as the lead and think of yourself as the director. Your ability to make the audience love your lead throughout the play is your content strategy. If the play isn’t engaging and the choreography is sloppy, even the best actor is sure to look foolish and unlikable. Your ability to direct your ‘play’ effectively and passionately is what helps your lead shine bright and captivate your audience in ways you never dreamed possible. 

While I could more than likely go on with this analogy for ages, let’s focus on the principles of business content creation specifically and see at the end how they all come together to form one amazing performance instead. 

Finding Your Voice

The first step to quality content for a business is finding that business’ voice. As George Jones once put it, “Be real about what you do. Stay true to the voice inside you. Don't let the 'business' change what it is you love because the people, the fans, respond to what is heartfelt. They can always tell when a singer is faking it.”

The truth is that the same can be said with your content as well. There’s a big difference between an article on surfing from a professional surfer or surfing fanatic versus one written by a general writer. You can feel the passion and sincerity in the article by the individual that truly loves surfing because it’s a topic they genuinely want to write about.

It’s like when you first meet your significant other and bring up a topic they enjoy. You can see the light in their eyes and the conversation quickly goes from general chit-chat to real connection between the two of you. It’s engaging and passionate and it draws you in because seeing anyone talk about what they love is guaranteed to be captivating. By finding your passion and your voice as a brand, you ensure that every piece of content you develop humanizes your brand, captivates your audience, and ties into your business and your love for what you do effortlessly. 

Determining how to Connect

The next step in creating a content strategy that truly works is finding your ‘in’ with your customers. Let’s be honest; pushing a connection between a brand and its target audience never works. It tends to read kind of like this scene with Steve Buscemi from 30Rock:
‍

‍
No one likes to feel like a brand is trying too hard to be cool or to connect with them. It has to come naturally. That’s why finding your connection point is crucial to content success. A great way to begin this search is by looking at your target audience in and of itself. This would be a great time to create buyer personas for your brand and use them to try and get a grasp on what your customers really like and find interest in. 

After you have your buyer personas created, search online and analyze your competitors to see what kinds of subjects and content this demographic responds to most frequently. For instance, if your brand is a sustainable dog treats brand, you may find that urban middle-class women between the ages of 18 and 30 really love your brand. You can then find out that they also love outdoor activities with their pets, cute pet pictures, eco-friendly news, and endearing rescue pet stories. 

Using this information, your content calendar may consist of rescue story interviews with local pet owners, the cutest pet fashion for the season, other eco-friendly pet products found on Etsy, and the coolest places in your state to go hiking with your dog. This is how you curate content that actually resonates with your customers on an intimate level as well.

Going back to the analogy of being on a first date with your significant other, seeing them light up about a subject on its own is engaging—but imagine if that subject was something you also loved. This is where the engagement combines with a genuine connection making the bond between the two far stronger. For brands, this is what turns content into profits and what helps retain customers indefinitely as well. 

Starting With the Basic 8

In content marketing, there are 8 basic categories: 

1. Evergreen content
2. Site copy 
3. Wide funnel blogs
4. Mid funnel blogs
5. Bottom funnel blogs
6. Social media posts and ads
7. Marketing copy
8. Linkable assets
   

To create a well-rounded content campaign for your brand, you will want to start with these 8 and build off of them moving forward. On average, I recommend at least 5 in each category to start. From there, the opportunities are endless. 

According to the Digital Marketing Institute, “Evergreen content is search-optimized content that is continually relevant and stays “fresh” for readers over a long period of time - as the name implies. You may think that all online content is sustainable; after all, a blog post doesn’t just disappear after you publish it. But evergreen content is different. It continues to be relevant long past its publication date, with search traffic growing over time.” In this content, focus on answering common questions in your industry and never mentioning specific times, dates, or current business plans. 

For instance, if your brand is a sustainable dog treats brand as discussed above, you may answer questions like, ‘what is a sustainable dog treat?,’ ‘Should dogs have wheat?,’ and ‘Is my dog allergic to gluten?’ These all are very common questions surrounding the dog treat industry that are likely to be searched regularly and help you gain site traffic you wouldn’t see otherwise. 

Next, site copy is the meat and potatoes of your business. Think of your site copy and design as the ultimate first impression to your potential customers. If your content is boring or subpar, it’s highly likely that your site traffic will bounce and leave before they ever see your products or services at all. You will also want to ensure that your site copy is optimized because it is one of the main ways in which a site is ranked by Google. 

For wide, mid, and bottom funnel blogs, the main focus is the connection points you found before. This is where those connection points and your overall brand voice will be put to the test. For wide funnel content, focus less on your specific brand and more on topics your customer may like. This is where an article on the best hikes to take your dog on would fit. Next, mid-funnel blogs are more specific to your industry but not your brand. This is where an article about the best eco-friendly pet products on Etsy would be perfect. Lastly, bottom-funnel content can either be about your brand itself or your very specific industry. A great bottom-funnel article would be ‘The benefits of (X Company) sustainable dog treats.’ 

As for social media posts and ads, social media is one of the most effective ways to connect with consumers nowadays which is what makes it so crucial to business success. Fortunately, you can start with a social media sentiment analysis and this will help you determine where you stand right now and how much more you have to accomplish! 

With marketing copy, this can be anything from direct mailers, pamphlets, eBooks, email newsletters, sales materials, and more. This form of content is all about creating hooks and keeping it simple. Having walls of text on brochures or emails is sure to detract your audience. For this type of content development, you want someone that is quick-witted, can fit your vision into a few sentences, and is able to knock out copy in a timely manner. 

Lastly, linkable assets are blog posts or evergreen pages designed specifically to help with link-building efforts. When creating a link-building strategy (which every business should have), the name of the game is seamless connections. Instead of trying to get a link to your product pages on a major site, write an article that smoothly connects with the article on their site. In this way, you make it easier for big magazines or blogs to get why they are linking to your page at that moment. 

For instance, if you are a company that makes weekly subscription food boxes for healthy lifestyles and you want to be featured on Shape.com, your best bet to do this is to have a blog on your site about the benefits of using a monthly meal subscription box for reaching your weight loss goals. You can then pitch a similar article to Shape and link to your ‘linkable asset’ blog in that article. In this way, you are seamlessly connecting your brand with Shape magazine and helping increase your site ranking and traffic as a result. 

Finding Your Groove

With your content types and your voice outlined, the next step is putting all of these strategies in action and finding your groove. As you consistently post, you will start to see trends as to when to post and what to post. You can then tailor your content frequency and start to create a pattern of content that your customers can depend on. As they recognize these patterns, they will start to look forward to your posting dates and the content you have in store.

This is where customer retention comes into play because the main principle of customer retention is staying valuable in the customer’s eyes. By always coming up with new content they are sure to love, you are doing just that and creating customers for life in exchange. 

Always Adapting, Always Improving

Lastly, with all of your content mapping and strategies in place, the last step is always adapting and improving as a brand. When you see trends in your content, you can’t simply acknowledge them and move on. You must use this data to improve your content and keep it connecting with your customers for longer.

For instance, going back to the sustainable dog treats example once again, if you see that your blog posts about your endearing rescue stories are doing great but the posts about activities with your pets are not, you will certainly want to switch your strategy. You can either find another topic to test out like dog therapy subjects or add on to your rescue story subject by featuring local rescue animals that people can adopt along with their stories. This is how you continue to adapt and improve your content in ways that benefit and expand your brand without fail.  

The Ultimate 8 Content Creation Mistakes Companies Make

Now that the fundamentals of content creation are outlined, it’s time to analyze the mistakes companies make with their content and how to avoid them below. By doing this, you can essentially learn from the mistakes of others and start your content journey off at an advantage that’s guaranteed to make all the difference.

1. Disregarding Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

One of the ultimate ways companies mess up their content strategies is by never once considering their optimization during the writing process. Being able to add relevant site links or remote links that work like this article on business owner search engine optimization is a highly important element of a good content strategy.

You need to also know how to use keywords in your blog posts such as content, business, local, Boise marketing, and more to ensure that your content pops up when people look up these words. These are just a few ways to focus on your business’ SEO but the options are nearly endless, and using them to your benefit is guaranteed to help you rise above the competition over time. 

2. Writing Articles That are too Long or too Short

According to HubSpot, “For SEO, the ideal blog post length should be 2,100-2,400 words, according to HubSpot data. We averaged the length of our 50 most-read blog posts in 2019, which yielded an average word count of 2,330. Individual blog post lengths ranged from 333 to 5,581 words, with a median length of 2,164 words.”

Although this may seem kind of long, think about the average post you’ve read online and the ones you chose not to read. Having incredibly short posts tends to mean the important information that your customers are looking for simply isn’t there while blog posts that read more like books are usually discarded in a matter of seconds by the average reader. By using this data from HubSpot to your benefit, you can avoid either mistake and find your happy medium moving forward. ‍

3. Covering the Wrong Topics

As stated above in the fundamentals of business content creation, finding your connection point with your customers is essential to brand content success. Covering topics that only you will find interesting or topics that are already covered so much it’s simply not necessary or wanted is a surefire way to blow your entire content strategy off the bat.

Instead, focus heavily on finding your niche and sticking to it. This is how you train your customers to expect what you are going to give them each post and train them to look forward to your content as well. ‍

4. Writing Generic Fluff Pieces Primarily

While generic fluff pieces can sometimes be a great way to fill in certain weeks or fill in a past of no blogs on your website, it’s not the basis of a great content strategy by no means. If all you ever offer your readers is generic and of no value, they will slowly stop reading your content altogether and not look forward to it every week. 

Instead, use the wide funnel category to get your generic fluff pieces out of the way and focus the rest of your categories on valuable content that actually benefits your readers and keeps them wanting to read more each and every time. 

5. Constantly Promoting Your Brand in Articles

Companies like Tier Level Digital Marketing know exactly how much and how little to promote themselves. That’s why you should definitely work with their team of experienced marketing experts starting today. Tier Level is composed of dozens of gifted and experienced marketers that know the difference between bragging too much and too little in any industry. Their team is literally made up of omnipotent content gods and they know it. So, what are you waiting for? Work with them and have your mind blown at the miracles they can accomplish for your brand in seconds.

See how absolutely annoying and cocky that paragraph above sounds? I, the writer, quite literally gagged when writing it because it sounds so obviously like a sales pitch with no real value to it at all. Did it even remotely seem like you were going to learn about how to promote your brand in a healthy way—or did it just seem like one big ploy to get a brand name and services seen by you? This is what it sounds like when brands promote themselves in every single post they make. 

Instead, focusing on the subject itself and showing your passion and knowledge when it comes to the subject is a far better way to create content and engage your audience positively as well. 

6. Assuming Quality Content is all That Matters‍

I’ve talked about this subject before but all in all, you can be a great content writer and still have no readers. Content isn’t just about the topics and the quality of the writing. It also must be optimized, shared effectively, be relevant to the times, and have value that can be easily recognized by the average reader.

As a brand, your ability to balance all of these qualities in your content is guaranteed to be the key to having the best content strategy possible moving forward. It’s what will either make or break your content strategy and the traffic it creates for your brand without fail. 

7. Never Developing a Content Strategy

The fundamentals of content creation shown above are all to create a content strategy that actually is mapped out and followed monthly. Knowing what you’d like to post and posting it when you can simply isn’t good enough. Having consistency and quality is what helps brands stand out with their content and actually see a return on investment because of it. 

With this being said, the first thing you should do when working on your content is create a content strategy and a content map that changes as you and your brand and customers change. This is what separates your bland brand from your exciting and profitable one every time. 

8. Forgetting to Share Every Blog on Social Media

Lastly, while it may seem obvious, many companies forget to share their amazing content on social media—and that’s a huge mistake. Sharing your blog posts on social media is the key to consistent content marketing and it’s a great way to connect your social media fans to your website regularly as well. This is the start of any quality customer journey map which is what makes it so important to business success and profits. 

By getting your social media followers on your site, you’ve already gotten one step closer to a sale. Next, with great content that leads them to other parts on your site like your contact page or product pages, you are slowly but surely getting them ever closer to becoming a real customer of yours in a smooth and entirely organic manner. Not bad, right?

What’s the Most Viable Solution to These Common Problems?

While I could tell you that each of these problems can easily be solved with passion and elbow grease on your end, the truth is that it tends to come down to expertise and skill at the end of the day as a content creator. Having said this, it’s clear why countless companies from countless industries rely on marketers and marketing brands to solve these issues for them. 

All in all, pretty much every job in the world can be done by any person—but that doesn’t mean it should be. For instance, you could definitely spend a month learning how to fix your sink when you have a plumbing issue arise and then do the job yourself. But, sometimes, it’s best to call the plumber and have the job done in a fraction of the time by someone who has been doing jobs like yours for decades. Not everyone has the time to wait, especially devoted business owners. That’s where a company like Tier Level Digital Marketing comes in.