A detailed content marketing strategy can be defined in plain English as the planning, writing, delivering, and the measurement of informational content online. A good content marketing strategy helps businesses achieve their goals such as an increase in sales or new customers by getting a wider presence on social media channels and the search engines.

In more simpler terms – it is about generating targeted traffic to your business. These days with the big trend regarding content marketing, many business are making mistakes with their content marketing strategy and not getting the best results they are after. Find below the biggest content marketing mistakes that should be avoided at all costs.

1. Not knowing your target audience

Before you start with your content marketing campaign, you will need to determine who your target audience is. Writing content that is focused around the target audience you would like to reach will do much better on the search engines and social media channels that you are using. If you write great content that is engaging and interesting, others may link to your content that helps you spread the reach of your campaign. Writing content for specific audiences can generate huge amounts of traffic to the content source and this is why it is so important that you study your target audience before you start writing content.

Don’t expect that you are only going to see good results on the content that you write and publish to your target audience. Writing magnetic content that draws in interested readers is a great part of SEO, and adding additional social interaction and link diversity should always be considered.

2. Poor content

Poor content or sometimes called low quality content may cause your target audience to ignore your message and go straight to your competitors. Make sure that what you write is easily read and that it makes sense. Don’t make it sound like a block of sales copy. Your content should always be free of spelling and grammatical errors.

3. Not using the best content on your own website

Don’t publish your best content on any third-party sites such as article directories that makes money via the content that others publish on their channels. Although social media helps spreading your message and awareness about your company, they are really not the place to put your best pieces of content. If you have a blog you can use your blog as the starting point of your content and then share that content to your social media channels. That way your best content always originates from your own source. Always invest your effort into your own website and blog first before you are going to produce content for your social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and even Google+.

4. Ignoring multimedia

Add meaningful images to your content so that it can retain the interest of your readers and improve the clarity of the content. Use modern tools to create good videos and images that you can post to the content on your blog, website, and the social media channels that you are using.

	About: Anton Koekemoer I’m a digital marketing specialist and I’m very passionate about online marketing. My main goal with marketing on the web focuses on designing strategic plans and business solutions around digital technologies to get good results. I’m also a blogger, dad, and I like golf, photography, and music.