Numerous content marketing experts have been blogging about the New Year and making predictions on how this marketing strategy will be affected.
It is no surprise that, across the board, most of these experts say bad will be the biggest pitfall for businesses in 2016.
Google loves fresh content, giving better ranking to websites that consistently add new articles, blog posts and other information on a regular basis.
With this kind of pressure, site owners and content marketers struggle to keep the flow of good content coming.
Sadly, the pressure of always having to publishing content can sometimes lead to the publishing of some really bad content.
What is Bad Content?
Obviously, for a content marketing campaign to be successful, you must be meticulous regarding typos, formatting errors, misspellings and even worse… poor research and inconsistent data.
Still, there are other bad content practices that must be done away with in 2016 such as…
1. Duplicate Content
Automated software can be beneficial for overworked content marketers but you should avoid posting duplicate content across your social media platforms.
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the rest should all be original. Stay away from article spinning and other second rate content writing practices.
This year the competition for viewership and online real estate is expected to be tougher than ever so be unique to your audience.
2. Too Much Promotion
Just say no to overly promoted content for your content marketing campaign. Sure, everything you are going to publish will be promotional is some way …but it doesn’t need to be so obvious.
Focus on how it was, back in the beginning, when the original goal of content marketers was simply providing free information that would benefit potential clients and customers.
3. Poorly Formatted Content
2016 content marketing techniques include getting rid of those giant blocks of text that readers and followers will shy away from.
Even the best content will be skimmed over or worse, ignored, if it is not easy to read.
Optimized subheadings, bullet points, links to sources and yes!
Infographics should all be an important part of your marketing campaign.
4. Following Content Marketing Rules
If you are a bit of a content marketing rebel, you already know that rules are made to be broken.
While you can find some really good advice about great articles and blog posts online, you should know that not all business models benefit from the same cookie cutter content marketing ‘rules’.
Be trendy or march to the beat of your own drum so long as you remember to provide quality.
5. Content Without Personality
Liz Murphy from B2C writes, “The most common of those rules being the use of second-person narrative, which is defined by the use of the pronoun “you,” as if you’re addressing someone directly …often leads to boring, instructional writing that’s devoid of personality.”
Of course there’s exceptions to this statement and there’s other ways content can lack personality, but avoiding second person is a good rule of thumb.
6. Playing it Safe with Content
This goes back to the pitfall about following content marketing rules. Break them!
Find your voice and write in your real (and educated) personality with authority on the topic.
If writing in second person makes you happy, then do it, but most importantly, be consistent and write with a respectable dose of personality.
7. Stale Titles
Some of the best content is overlooked because of tired titles that have been used time and again. Be creative in choosing interesting and catchy titles for your articles and blog posts.
Don’t let ho-hum and over-used titles steal your content marketing thunder.
A great tool to improve your headlines is Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer. Paste in your title idea and get scored on elements such as length, sentiment, and word balance until you come up with a catchy title, reflected by a high score.
8. No Show, All Tell
Want to know another technique that will make your articles blog posts reach more of your target market in 2016? Stop thinking of of content marketing as simply writing!
This year, experts predict that more and more site owners and content marketers will realize the benefits of using visual content.
Videos and infographics will be on the rise this year which means increased exposure for sites that figure this out first and start producing interesting, high-quality videos.
These are just a few of the many content marketing pitfalls that will trip many site owners and writers up in the New Year. Make 2016 your brand’s best year yet with top quality content that avoids these and many other content marketing pitfalls.
Which content marketing strategies will you change in 2016?
