07 Jun 7 Great Tips for Content Marketing

Content marketing can be a tricky activity, with articles easily putting visitors off rather than getting them interested in your product or service. In a recent survey, only 33% of marketers in North America, Australia and the United Kingdom found content marketing to be effective. As marketers we didn’t exactly go into this business to be content creators. Here are some mistakes that many of us make as we try to walk the tightrope between keeping it interesting and selling our wares.
1. It is all about you; it isn’t all about you. While the endgame is always conversion, the customer, or potential customer, will always be interested first in his or her amusement, or at least a problem for which you might have a solution. Address content marketing from the point of view of the potential customer.
2. Go ahead and fail. How bad can it be? Take chances. The more chances you take the more your failures will talk to you. Failures always contain information which leads to our next success.
3. Set high standards. It’s not enough to fake it. The content you create and provide about your product or service has to run on all cylinders. It has to entertain, inform, evoke interest and bring the highest percentage of visitors around to communicating with you, if not converting.
4. Use yourself, your staff and outside resources. Your English teacher was able to tell when your work wasn’t your own. We all have a distinct writing style. So mix it up. Have staff contribute. Be sure to go outside and hire, at least on occasion, professional writers to create some of your content.
5. Write in different styles, tell the same story. PR writing is different from content writing is different from copy writing. All three have a different focus. But each has to tie up with a consistent message. Make sure you are telling the same story, and telling it in the correct manner.
6. Lower the threshold for interaction. If you can’t get a conversion, go for a query. If you can’t get a query, go for a newsletter sign-up. Whatever content you create, the strategy should be to get the visitor to leave footprints.
7. Use calls to action. Put calls to action in your content. Tell the visitor to do something. Let them know your expectation.
These are not by any means the only areas to watch for in your content marketing. Many more good ideas are contained here:
http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2013/05/reasons-content-marketing-might-fail/