1. Producing relevant content and without taking design into consideration.

-Stock photography that looks stock does absolutely nothing to promote authenticity—in fact it degrades it.

2. Putting multiple people in charge of your content marketing strategy without direction or oversight.

-Too many Indians equals a watered down content marketing strategy, and too little input equals words on a page without a clear call to action. Your content strategy should be your marketing department’s number one priority and your top team should be managing it, or managing the vendor who is managing it.

3. Creating a content marketing strategy without looking at what your competitors are doing.

-Although there is never a guaranteed blueprint for success, you have to perform due diligence before investing time and money towards content. To really hit it out of the park, you should be looking at what the most successful companies across all markets are doing. Subscribe to Ad Age Daily for a taste of what market leaders are up to.

4. Using the same format over and over.

-Unless you are the New York Times, the “wall of words” approach probably isn’t the best strategy, so mix it up. How-to’s, charticles and Q & A’s are all effective ways to engage readers through memorable content.

5. Telling your story instead of letting your customers tell it for you.

-New customers don’t trust you, but they do trust your current customers. Offer happy customers free services or products to participate in an interview or case study. Create a community or forum from which you can cull great stories.

6. Blogging, every once in awhile.

-Your blogging strategy should drive your content marketing strategy. People want to do business with people, not monolithic corporations, so show potential customers who you are and what you know. (Google likes new content, too.)

7. Interviewing customers and not re-purposing the audio from the interview into a podcast.

-Audio is easily captured during an interview via digital recorder or conference call recording. You can highlight one great answer or post the entire interview. We call this a two-for-one. (Story and a podcast.)

8. Tossing new tools (Podcasts, Video, Wiki’s and widgets) atop an unclear content strategy, or shaky infrastructure.

-Implementing a wiki, case studies and a handful of widgets is not going to unleash the customer floodgates. You have to have build your content strategy from the top down, and from the inside out. Seth Godin’s book Meatball Sundae describes this in detail.

9. Telling people what they already know.

-Don’t repeat what is already common knowledge. I quote and reference many authors, content marketers and executives but I don’t always agree with everything they say, and I say so. You need to make your voice heard. Don’t be gray—it doesn’t look good on you. Be orange instead.

10. Talking to too broad of an audience at one time.

-If your content marketing plan involves a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to connecting with prospective customers, stop. Go back to the drawing board and start over. Successful marketing only works when your message is targeted. If you are creating content targeting middle-aged drivers and teens, chances are you are going to fail miserably on both fronts.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Content, Managing Editor, News, Uncategorized, content marketing, custom content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.