The Seven Cardinal Sins of Content Marketing

Writing great content is vital; it ensures that you are able to build a relationship with your readership and transform them from passers-by into customers and evangelists.

Here’s the slightly darker side of content marketing and what you should try to avoid:

1 – Underestimate the influence content has (Gluttony)

It’s easy to devour what feel like the big facts and shun marketing as pretty posters and well placed words, but content marketing is vital to generating more business. Just as a moody front of house gives a terrible impression of a restaurant, perhaps in spite of excellent food in the kitchen, sloppy content will have the same effect on your business.

It is your front of house and as such should reflect the standards to which you would like to be known for. Don’t lose potential opportunities to convert customers through content, which hasn’t demanded your full attention.

2 – Have no strategy (Pride)

Don’t let your ego get in the way of setting up a decent content strategy. Without a comprehensive strategy, you may end up wasting excellent written copy. Don’t make great content futile by failing to consider a long-term plan for your content or to think that what you’re interested in writing is what your audience wants to read. Look ahead in the year to relevant product launches, events and regulations, which may impact your company. If you need a little more guidance, this is a great guide to quickly building a content marketing strategy in 3 easy steps.

3 – Release your content erratically (Anger)

Stick to a schedule with releasing content whether that’s ten tweets a day, one blog a month or a weekly email. Regularity reflects well on your strategy, commitment and organisation and will help to generate more readers for your copy. This article, talks more about the benefits of a well-planned content schedule.

4 – Get lazy with platform editing (Sloth)

You’ve got a fantastic piece on content. Unfortunately putting that great magazine content onto online platforms doesn’t mean you have integrated your platforms. Copy and tone of voice vary between different methods of marketing. You can’t write everything in 140 characters or less and you don’t always have the luxury of a large word count to play around with. Take the time to adapt your content to different platforms and integrate it properly to maximise the effect it could have.

5 – Write panicked posts (Lust)

You may want to get content out there as quickly as possible to compete with other businesses but unlike print marketing, in using the internet you probably won’t have the luxury of a sub-editor. It’s better to take time to ensure that your content is strong (and grammatically correct) before hastily putting it online.

6 – Be stingy on the information (Greed)

Don’t be greedy and withhold all the information you can give your customers. You’re trying to generate more of them and the way to transform a reader into a customer is to build a level of trust and rapport. If you don’t inform your reader and divulge a few juicy facts then they won’t believe you have anything of importance to say. Give your readers something to get their teeth into so they can gain that level of trust in your business.

This recent infographic created from survey data shows us that no demographics value brevity as long as content is clear.

7 – Get jealous of others’ success (Envy)

Instead of being resentful of others’ content marketing successes, ensure you measure your own successes/failures so you learn what has worked well for you in the past and how to build upon that success.

Take note of your tone of voice, headlines, platform, timings for your posts, relevancy, use of images, formatting and you will gain a clear idea of how to generate better responses in the future. This article tells you how to analyse your data and, with a bit more effort, your competitors’ data and how to use what you find to improve the performance of your content in the future.