Did you know that companies that blog have 434% more indexed pages than those who don’t blog? A vital marketing strategy to help move up your website in any search engine is building up blog content with an SEO strategy.
Creating website content, such as blogs, takes thoughtful strategy and planning. Keep reading, and we will guide you through eight common blog marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.
1. Don’t Over Promise
You want to ensure that when you’re creating content for marketing, you aren’t making promises, or in marketing, it’s called a “claim” that you can’t deliver. If you write something and can’t produce it, it will only result in less brand trust and a negative association with your brand.
Your content shouldn’t be centered around claiming you’re “#1” in the world or your industry unless you can back it up. You also don’t want to promise an update to your website, product, or service unless you know it will happen.
You can avoid doing this by being realistic and sticking to the facts. If you say your website will be updated by a specific date and it’s not, you can let people know it’s delayed.
2. Avoid Spam And Promotional Content
When building a blog marketing strategy, you must be careful about creating promotional content. Like an email, a blog with too much promotional content is considered spam.
Building up blog content is to provide informative content that will appeal to your target audience. You should avoid pushing your products or services because they won’t hold people’s attention.
61% of B2B marketers said that SEO and organic traffic generate more leads than other marketing strategies. Although this is very important and you should work on your SEO, you still need to consider your readers.
When you’re writing a blog, you should always take a step back and make sure you’re writing for the people and not the bots working in the back end of Google’s search engine.
3. Features vs. Benefits
When you’re considering different topics for blogs, it’s easy to focus on the product or service features of what you’re selling. However, people can see the elements of what you’re selling.
You want to focus on how your product or service will help or benefit your target audience. You should produce content that describes how you are making their life easier with your product or service that will hook your audience.
4. Poor Guest Post Outreach
You might be thinking to yourself, “What is guest blogging?” Guest blogging happens when marketing businesses collaborate with a blogger or website to create promotional content that drives back to your website using a backlink and will help build brand awareness.
An essential part of guest posts is reaching out to people you want to work with. Some people will reach out and ask for infographics or content without any context or interest in learning about the people behind the content.
If you want to build a good relationship and get guest post content, you should reach out and ask to schedule a call first. Showing this courtesy will help you get great content and help build a relationship to get more.
5. Avoid Fluff
Whether you’re working on social media blog posts or blogs for your website, you want to avoid fluff. Fluff is content that doesn’t mean anything, such as “There are many types of cars.”
You should continuously be checking your content for quality and that it follows a consistent format and tone to your other pieces that are promoting your product or service. Also, you can avoid fluff by working with your marketing team, sharing tips on producing quality content, and always having someone check work before something goes live.
6. Don’t Lose the Big Picture
Blog content and SEO are essential to your marketing strategy and drive people to your website. That being said, you need to focus on your sales pages, product videos, guides, email eNewsletters, and more to sell your product.
It would be best if you looked at your big-picture strategy when you’re writing blog content to help enhance all of your other marketing materials. You can use blogs to promote your products and services on social media, your website, and guest posts.
7. Empathy Is Key
When writing blog content, you want to put yourself in your target audience’s shoes. It would be best if you were looking at their perspective, and empathy is vital to see how your product or service can help your audience.
The best advertisements, from commercial to website ads, have emotion. When people feel like you care, they are more trusting and willing to try your product or service.
8. Be Careful Of Clickbait
Clickbait, like promotional content, is something you should avoid altogether. It involves using promotional messages that have nothing to do with the content.
The title or blurb that is eye-catching and makes people click typically has nothing to do with the content and is misleading. People use it to drive people to their website, but it doesn’t build positive brand awareness or trust.
If anything, it creates distrust because you’re misleading people to drive them to your website. You can avoid this by using headlines and blurbs that accurately describe the content.
You can test different relevant headlines and blurbs to see what performs best; as long as they accurately depict what it’s your blog, you can try to see what drives people to your website.
Avoid These Blog Marketing Mistakes
Now that you know the top eight blog marketing mistakes to avoid, you can work with your marketing team on a content strategy that puts you in a great position with your audience and SEO.
The top mistakes include overpromising, spamming people, over-promoting features over benefits, poor outreach for guest posts, too much fluff, and clickbait. You want to ensure you’re always looking at the big picture of your overall marketing strategy and lead with empathy and emotion when you’re writing.
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