Content marketing strategy workshop audiences are always interested in hearing about best practices. Best practices seems like easy answers; they make it seem as if all you have to do is simply do what another brand has found successful.
The easy answer, however, isn’t always the right answer. What makes sense for another brand won’t necessarily make sense for your brand, whether that is in content marketing strategy or another area.
We find it’s much more valuable to share tools and techniques workshop attendees can use to draft the best strategies and tactics for themselves.
10 Content Marketing Strategy Mistakes Your Competitors are Making
In some industries, however, it is valuable to consider the best MISTAKES your competitors are making and do the OPPOSITE of what they are doing.
Here are ten "mistake practices" we see frequently that fit the bill:
- Starting with a big splash and lots of new content all bunched up in the first week of a new blog, then sinking to the bottom of the pool and not updating any of the content for months at a time.
- Having a business objective for its blog (i.e., increasing leads for a new product), but never writing blog posts with the business objective in mind.
- Writing and publishing new content without providing any context and brand perspective for the content, even though a significant percent of blog visitors are likely first-time readers who are unfamiliar with the brand.
- Writing about their brand all the time, including republishing their press releases word-for-word as blog posts.
- Sharing only news that has a very short interest life so they get in a trap of not getting long-term value from the investment in creating social media content.
- Publishing only when they have something to say and then thinking they never have anything to say.
- Handing the social media controls over to a recent graduate ONLY because he or she is young and “gets” Twitter and Facebook.
- Never mentioning who is doing the writing in a deliberate strategy to keep the content devoid of any personality, whether brand personality or content creator personality.
- Sharing social media content that has nothing to do with the organization’s brand and brand personality.
- Figuring all this social networking stuff is free and not making smart investments to get the most impact from the content the brand creates.
As an executive in your organization, you’d do well to spend some time on your social media presences – just in case it’s been some time since you looked at them closely – and see if you are making any of your competitors’ mistakes with your own content marketing strategy.
If you are making these content marketing strategy mistakes, get them fixed – pronto!
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