Creating a Content Strategy? Avoid These 10 Common Content Marketing Mistakes

“We need a blog post for a new product announcement.”

“We have to create content for this new vertical before a trade show.”

Every content strategist knows that creating an effective content strategy is critical to building your brand, engaging your audience, and driving business results. Yet, due to shifting priorities, a lack of resources, and time crunches, even a seasoned content marketer can overlook potential pitfalls that can hinder success. 

But creating valuable content that will pull your potential customers into (and through!) the marketing funnel, takes time and attention.

To help you steer clear of these obstacles, I’ve outlined the most frequent content marketing mistakes to avoid when crafting your brand content strategy. 

For each common mistake, I’ve listed ways to avoid it, and offer a list of questions, ideas, or examples.

1. Lack of Clear Objectives and Goals

A common mistake in content marketing is jumping into content creation without defining clear objectives. It’s easy to do that. You are in a meeting and someone asks how long will it take to do a white paper? Next thing you know, you are creating a white paper, without understanding the why or how it’ll be used. 

Avoid It: Establish both short-term and long-term goals before creating content. Whether it’s building brand awareness, driving website traffic, or increasing pipeline velocity, clear goals will help shape the content you create and measure its success effectively.

Questions: If your company wants to improve brand awareness — what is the budget behind this? Primary research reports are terrific vehicles to drive brand and media awareness. If the goal is to drive website traffic — then you might want a greater focus on search engine optimization (SEO). If the goal is to increase pipeline velocity — then you might want to have a lot of content that can work to educate multiple personas and stakeholders simultaneously (vs sequentially).

2. Ignoring Your Audience’s Needs

Not understanding your audience can lead to content that misses the mark. If you’re creating content based on what your brand wants to say instead of what your audience wants to hear, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Avoid It: Develop detailed buyer personas and conduct regular research to understand your audience’s pain points, preferences, and interests. Create content that speaks directly to their needs and desires, making it relevant and engaging.

Questions: Personas often include titles, pain points, and how they’ll benefit from your solution. But try and get your product marketing people to do audience research and find out what really keeps your audience up at night? Is it fear of a breach? Is it fear of having staff taken away? Is it exciting to innovate? Understanding the psychological motivators for your audience is key in any content marketing effort.  

In all cases, you need to know: Who is the target audience? Where are they in the funnel? What’s their assumed level of knowledge? What is the behavior you’d like them to take when they have finished reading an asset? How will success be measured? How will this be promoted (organic, social, ad dollars)? 

3. Inconsistent Brand Voice and Messaging

Inconsistency in tone, style, or messaging can confuse your audience and dilute your brand’s identity. If each piece of content feels like it’s coming from a different source, you risk undermining your brand’s credibility. 

Avoid It: Develop a content style guide that outlines your brand’s tone, voice, and messaging. Share it with your team and content creators to ensure a cohesive voice across all channels and platforms.

Idea: Consider building a custom GPT that recognizes your tone and style. You’ll want to upload your style guide and a representative sample of your existing or old content and let the assistant analyze it. Now when you create new content, you can upload it to see how well it conforms to your style.

4. Overlooking the Importance of a Content Plan

Creating content without a plan can lead to a chaotic content calendar, missed deadlines, and an inconsistent publishing schedule. It’s a recipe for confusion and inefficiency. I always made a distinction between blog content planning and “Big Rocks Planning.” Big Rocks were any type of content piece that were being promoted. These are items that typically have hard and fast deadlines. Socialize your Big Rock plan at least quarterly to your marketing operations, campaign, and content production teams. 

In general, a blog post won’t be as deadline sensitive. Think in terms of creating blogs around content pillars and topic clusters. 

Avoid It: Develop a comprehensive content plan that maps out your content themes, topics, and publishing schedule.  Make sure you account for content production time, too. You may need more than one content calendar and project management software to help you stay organized and on track.

Idea: In quarterly planning, find out what campaign managers will be promoting. Dovetail your Big Rock calendar with these campaign plans. For blog post planning, find out what new key messages and topics have evolved internally — and create new topic clusters if appropriate. These can be quarterly goals. Use a tool like MarketMuse to see if old content needs to be optimized for SEO. 

5. Forgetting to Promote Content

Even the best content needs promotion. If you’re not actively promoting your content through channels like social media, email marketing, and partnerships, it’s unlikely to gain the traction it deserves. You can also promote through your blog channel!

Avoid It: If it’s not you, make sure the stakeholders who are responsible for promoting content are aware of what is available. Identify the right channels and audiences, and use a mix of organic and paid tactics to distribute your content effectively. I always worked closely with my campaign teams to find out what was needed — as well as socialize what would be available. 

Opportunity: Help your audience find the next best piece of content by strategically placed calls to action that will take readers to the next best piece of content. To do so, you must know your audience’s sales journey. 

6. Skipping SEO Best Practices

Even the best content can go unnoticed if it’s not optimized for search engines. If your content doesn’t rank well, it’ll struggle to reach its intended audience. 

Avoid It: Conduct keyword research and use SEO best practices when crafting your content. Incorporate keywords naturally, optimize meta descriptions and titles, and ensure your content answers the questions your audience is searching for. Use MarketMuse to determine the audience intent behind the query – and what key subtopics should be included to rank.

Note: Remember, your competition isn’t standing still. Just because a blog ranks high today — doesn’t mean it’ll be next week. SEO best practices include continuously optimizing existing content.

7. Neglecting to Measure and Analyze Performance

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. If you’re not tracking and analyzing your content’s performance, you’re missing opportunities to refine your strategy and drive better results.

Avoid It: Use tools like Google Analytics, social media insights, and content management platforms to track performance metrics. Focus on engagement, time-on-page, conversion rates (like driving people to the next step in the sales journey) and other relevant KPIs. Regularly assess what’s working and what’s not, then adjust your strategy accordingly.

Note: Don’t be seduced by just large volumes of traffic. Some posts may only be valuable to a small — yet crucial —  segment of your audience. For example, with an enterprise technology solution, a chief information security officer (CISO) will need to “bless” the purchase. We found that assets targeted by this persona were typically relevant only late in the sales cycle. 

8. Not Aligning Content With Sales Funnel Stages

Creating content without considering where your audience is in the sales funnel can result in misalignment. Some people will enter your funnel already solution-aware and just want to know more about your solution. Others may not have the slightest clue they need a solution at all and are searching for answers to a problem or question they have. Top-of-funnel prospects don’t need heavy sales pitches, while bottom-of-funnel prospects don’t need broad educational content.

Avoid It: Map your content to each stage of the sales funnel‌ — ‌awareness, consideration, and decision. Tailor the content type and message to the specific needs of your audience at each stage. Proactively offer links to the next best assets in your journey flow.

Examples: If you have top-of-funnel content — where you are explaining why a new type of solution is needed — putting a link to “why your product is better” is not yet relevant. Your audience isn’t ready for that. See if you can’t find an asset that more closely mirrors the next step in their knowledge journey —  and if you don’t have it — put it on your blog calendar.

9. Failing to Repurpose and Reuse Content

You spend a lot of time and energy creating an asset. If you don’t consider how else it could be used, you’re wasting a valuable asset. Part of your plan should be to periodically review your existing content. Content repurposing is a cost-effective way to extend the life of your content.

Avoid It: Look for ways to repurpose existing content into new formats. Turn a blog post into an infographic, a webinar into a blog series, or a case study into a video testimonial. Repurposing content helps maximize its reach and value.

Examples: Take three blogs that encompass the whole journey flow — and turn them into an ebook. Research reports can usually be segmented for different audiences by using cross-tab data. Any original research should be leveraged in blogs and other assets.

10. Focusing on Quantity vs Quality Content

Creating content for content’s sake doesn’t necessarily mean better results. Content that is poorly researched, rushed, or lacks value will only clutter your channels and frustrate your audience. I find that content marketers may say yes to creating more assets then they can – and quality is sacrificed.. 

Avoid It: Prioritize quality content over quantity. Each piece of content should provide value, be thoroughly researched, and be aligned with your brand’s goals and audience’s needs. A well-crafted blog post or engaging visual content video is far more effective than multiple low-quality pieces. Know your capacity. If more “Big Rocks” are needed – then scale back on the number of blogs you are doing. But make sure you socialize that the trade off might be less organic traffic.

Examples: Understand Content Distribution and promotion when capacity planning. If you are relying on SEO and organic inbound marketing – then scale back on Big Rocks. If you have a budget to spend and are tight on resources, scale back on blogs.

Final Thoughts: Mastering Content Strategy by Avoiding Mistakes

Developing a successful brand content strategy is no small feat. By avoiding these common mistakes, you can create a more effective strategy that engages your audience, builds your brand, and drives business results. Remember, content strategy is an iterative process‌ — ‌don’t be afraid to test, learn, and refine as you go. With a solid understanding of what to avoid, you’re well on your way to mastering brand content strategy development.