5 Content Creation Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make

Is your content missing its target? Are you not seeing the engagement or ROI you expected? You might be making some common content creation mistakes.

Content provides relevant and valuable information to your target audience and helps you engage and acquire customers. However, one mistake can prevent your content from reaching the intended audience and render your marketing strategy a failure.

Luckily, most content creation mistakes are easy to fix. To help you maximize your content marketing ROI, here are five common content creation mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Not Knowing Your Audience

Defining your target market is essential in content creation. If your content doesn’t attract audience attention, your content won’t be read or shared.

If you know your audience and give them what they want, you’ll see an increase in engagement with your content, leading to more conversions and sales.

To create content to resonate with the audience, ask yourself these questions:

• Who is the target audience of this article?
• What are you hoping to accomplish with the content?
• What needs to be included in this article for them to find what they’re looking for?
• What value does this reader provide to our business?

Ensure each content topic addresses an audience need and is aligned to your overall content marketing objectives. Consider your audience’s most pressing problems and create content to solve those challenges.

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2. Not Diversifying Your Content Format

Every person consumes information differently—Some prefer visual content to text-based content. When creating content, don’t limit yourself to writing a blog post. Provide a variety of content formats to widen your audience including:

• Whitepapers
• How-to guides
• Checklists
• Webinars
• Videos (e.g. YouTube)
• Memes
• Infographics
• GIFs
• Social media posts
• Podcasts
• Images
• Animations

You also don’t need to use just one format. Feel free to combine formats to maximize appeal. For example, when you write a blog post, you could include images or infographics to illustrate your point.

Think about what types of content would appeal to your target audience and mix up the formats.

3. Not Promoting Content on Social Media

The key to creating engaging content is for your audience to read it. However, they can’t read it if they don’t know it exists. Since most of your audience, if not all, interacts on social media platforms at least once a day, capture their attention by promoting your content on your various channels.

• Find out what platforms your target audience uses most often and post about your content.
• Don’t just use text posts but try to include visual content such as pictures, infographics and charts.
• On Facebook, users interact more with video than text-based posts so try to include videos in some of your posts.

4. Not Proofreading for Spelling and Grammar

Whether you realize it or not, people judge you and your business based on grammar and spelling. The fewer grammatical errors and typos in your content, the more people will trust you and the content you post. You also want to ensure your content is factual, especially if you are including technical information. Here are some steps to take to reduce the chances of mistakes:

• Use software like Grammarly to automatically review your content for mistakes. Word processing programs such as Google Docs and Microsoft Word include spelling and grammar checkers.
• Ask someone review your posts and articles grammatical and spelling errors before publishing—other people may spot mistakes you missed because you were too close to the content.
• Ask a subject-matter expert to review your content for factual errors.
• Perform a final review, paying particular attention to ensuring your business and product names are displayed correctly.

5. Forgetting to Include a Call-to-Action

The purpose of creating content is to move your audience to take action but without a strong call to action, your chances of converting the reader to a lead decreases significantly. Ensure all content contains a clear call-to-action, directing your audience to the next step. The goal of the content is to capture their email address. Some examples include having your audience:

• Comment on your blog or social media posts
• Download an ebook or a product guide
• Sign up for a free trial or consultation of your products and services
• Subscribe for updates on your products/services
• Attend a webinar or take an online training course

The pressure to create strong engaging content is higher than ever, but mistakes can leave you with nothing to show for your efforts. By avoiding the common mistakes listed in this article you can drive more traffic to your content and increase your ROI.

Understanding the basics of content marketing is the tip of the iceberg. You will of course want a way to show your content to the world, and your website is the best way to show your content to the world. See a demo of how our digital experience specialists can help you put your best foot forward online.

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