Times have changed and today’s marketers are now responsible for more than just creative inspiration. Whether we’re combing through metrics to realize demographic insights or creating engaging content that establishes thought leadership, the daily schedule of a modern marketer is full to the brim. Among all the tasks at hand, though, maintaining and nurturing your brand’s various content marketing vehicles should remain a chief priority.
According to research from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), B2B marketers work on an average of 13 content marketing tactics at one time while B2C marketers leverage 11. Simply put, a marketer’s daily workload is quite an undertaking. To get a handle on all the complexities, marketers should drill down on marketing tactics to focus more intently on the most successful channels; this ought to greatly increase your ability to maintain and nurture channels more effectively.
You may be leveraging a myriad of content platforms—and that’s a great thing—but make sure you give a little extra TLC to three tried and true platforms: blogging, email marketing and social media. Refer to this list of mistakes and best practices to ensure your marketing plan hits the mark:
Blogging: Your blog should be the backbone of your digital content presence. After all, this is the place where your business can establish its thought leadership and brand voice. However, many marketers diminish their blog’s potential by failing to post regularly and creating too much company-centric copy. If your articles read more like a brochure than an informative story, it’s not likely you’ll receive much customer engagement. Use your blog content to add value to your customer’s lives by:
- Conducting market research
- Keeping it current, i.e., leveraging news stories
- Providing actionable tips
Email Marketing: A haphazardly conducted email marketing campaign stands a high risk of its messages landing in more spam folders than inboxes. Consumers spend even less time gauging the value of an email than they do a blog post. As such, a marketer’s most detrimental email marketing blunder is a lackluster subject line. But, that’s not to say that mistakes aren’t made in the body of the message as well. For instance, sales-oriented phrases such as “great deal” and “sign up now” aren’t ideal buzzwords for an email campaign because many spam folders are designed to filter out these types of messages. Keep the sales pitch to a minimum and instead:
- Educate yourself on “spammy” terminology to avoid
- Pinpoint buyers’ challenges and provide valuable suggestions (as opposed to simply pitching a sale)
- Keep your subject line short and to the point
Social Media: Wondering why it’s so hard to gain more followers and receive more retweets? It could be because you are inconsistently posting on social media or focused on promotional posts as opposed to contributing to meaningful online conversations. After all, these are two of the most common mistakes marketers make on social media. In addition, a number of marketers fail to adequately monitor the chatter about their brand on social and to regularly report social media metrics. Sidestep these all-too-common social media pitfalls by completing the following tasks:
- Create a posting schedule and pre-plan your posts
- Post about relevant information, i.e., new studies or current events
- Interact with your consumers by asking questions or starting a conversation
Your content marketing platforms need to be shown a bit more love. But, if you’re strapped for time in your whirlwind work week, you can always reach out to a custom content marketing vendor to help handle the legwork.
