3 content marketing mistakes that could kill your brand

When done right, content marketing has the potential to catapult your business into the limelight, earn you hordes of new followers, and drastically improve your bottom line. However, when done incorrectly, it has the potential to completely kill your brand. Below, we investigate three of the most common digital /content marketing mistakes that every entrepreneur needs to be aware of and avoid at all costs.

Playing it safe

Not only does this refer to the type of content that you choose to produce, but also to the content itself. Marketers tend to avoid stirring up controversy in the fear of losing already-existing followers or offending those who could potentially be interested in their brand and what it has to offer. This is a huge mistake. Ultimately, people have opinions – and because these opinions are often strong, individuals will often feel a need to engage with content that either validates their opinions or, on the contrary, challenges them.

Boring, predictable content is not likely to garner much response at all. However, by embracing the power of content that may be considered slightly controversial, you guarantee an increase in shares, comments and interest in general. Having said that, it is also important to remember that there is a very delicate art to creating ‘controversial’ content and the key is to find a topic within your industry that tends to cause a divide amongst people.

The next step would be to discuss the topic in detail, attempting to give both sides of the story. The real secret is to analyse each side of the spectrum without taking too much of a stand of your own. In this way, offending anyone is highly unlikely – but you are still sure to elicit a strong, opinionated response which, in turn, is sure to result in the start of a healthy debate amongst your followers and those who come across your content by chance (most likely as a result of the stir which it is creating). Either way, your content will have made, and left, its mark on all those who come into contact with it.

Failing to Comprehend the Intricacies of Social Media

When it comes to digital marketing, business owners tend to do one of two things – they either opt to embrace the power of social media in its entirety (creating business profiles and accounts on every possible platform), or they opt to forego it completely. Unfortunately, both choices can be incredibly detrimental to your brand. There are two problems that can occur when social media is abused (for lack of a better term).

Either it will be impossible to dedicate enough time to maintaining and building the brand’s presence on each platform, thus resulting in mediocre results all around; or, at least regarding some of the platforms, the marketers’ efforts will go completely unnoticed – the company’s target audience simply won’t be present due to the fact that said target audience simply doesn’t interact with certain platforms on which the company is focusing a large amount of its time. The bottom line is that intensive research into the types of people who utilise specific social media platforms, as well as the exact type of person who would be interested in your brand or product offering in general, is of the utmost importance when it comes to making content marketing work for you.

Forgetting about the Importance of Mobile

If the recent Google algorithm updates are anything to go by, the mobile revolution is definitely in full swing – and, as a result, should form an important part of every business’s digital marketing strategy. When you take into consideration the fact that 61% of all internet activity in 2015 was conducted via a mobile device – which was a four percent increase from 2014 – it is easy to understand why forgetting about the importance of optimising your content for mobile could, in fact, kill your brand; or, at the very least, drastically reduce the impact of your efforts.

Knowing this, doing all that you can to ensure that all of your content, as well as your website itself, is optimised for mobile is the simplest way in which to maximise your digital marketing efforts and garner a favourable result.

Ultimately, what it all boils down to when it comes to achieving online marketing success is the willingness to take risks, to do plenty of research and to ensure that your strategy covers all possible bases. And, most importantly, don’t be afraid to stray from what may currently be considered ‘the norm’ – in doing so, instead of killing your brand, it just might transform it for the better.