9 Content Marketing Mistakes I See Small Businesses Make and How to Fix Them
Angelina Radulovic
Marketing strategist focused on content that sells with heart. | Connecting all content puzzles for your small business so you don't have to.
MarketingFairy #28
Reading time: 8 minutes
As promised, I’m starting longer posts every second Tuesday for those who want to dig deeper into some specific issues. This time, I’ve collected ten content marketing mistakes I often see small businesses make.
I wanted to start with this, as it’s essential, and I sincerely believe any business, no matter how small or big, whether an entrepreneur or a 1000-employee business, should have these mistakes fixed.
So please read through and let me know if it’s valuable or not, is it for you or not.
1. Having unclear strategy (or no strategy).
It usually goes like this:
As soon you get an idea about your business, you want to start posting about it. So you start posting tweets for a few weeks, then a couple of blog posts, and open a TikTok account to follow the trend.
After a month or two, you don’t know what to post, when, and most importantly, why to post it.
You just got into the “lack of marketing strategy” bucket.
This is the most common mistake businesses make.
There is no strategy behind the content they produce.
Throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what will stick is an expensive way to test your content.
I know that understanding your target audience, market research and outlining goals sounds boring, but the most boring staff usually bring the majority of results.
Solution:
Start small. You don’t need to know everything.
You can make a solid strategy in seven steps. I always recommend using Business Model Canvas, a one-page model, to get a clear picture of what you sell, what problem you solve, who your customers are, what channels you use, what activities you plan, what your revenue streams are…
Steps to the strategy
2. Failing to understand your audience
If you talk to everyone, you talk to no one.
Knowing what your audience cares about and where they exist online is essential.
After you find your target audience (part of a broader target market), you’ll get better clarity on content, email marketing, and copywriting. You should even have your ideal buyer persona when crafting content.
Solution:
Do it right, step by step.
TIP: Looking into Google Analytics and social media analytics, you can see if your content reaches your target audience and what channels bring you the most acquisitions.
3. Too much focus on sales
The company's goal is to sell, and marketing is vital to that mix. But doing marketing is not sending pushy sales messages in every post or filling CTA with screaming “buy” context.
“Behind every piece of bad content is an executive who asked for it” ~ Michael Brenner
Only up to 20% of your content should incorporate some sales message.
The rest should be other content pillars: inform, educate or entertain your audience.
Solution:
First help, then sale is the most helpful approach or sell it smart. Or as Gary Wee says - Jab, Jab, Jab Hook.
This way, you prioritise building trust and credibility through relationship-focused marketing, which results in converting leads into customers.
4. Posting without consistency.
You can’t wait for inspiration to strike. You need relations, engagement, and to stay on people’s top of mind. This mistake is the easiest to fix by simply implementing a few steps and making them a habit.
Solution:
My FREE content calendar in Notion is a good start. I’ve included a guide on how to make blog posts (click on make new - from the template). Please reply to this email if you need any help with this template.
5. Not focusing on SEO. Or focusing too much.
Posting to a void of the Internet without SEO optimising your content is like throwing a glass of water in the ocean. That means your content won’t be found > no visitors > no audience. 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine.
领英推荐
Solution:
These steps are foundational if you have your website. However, I don’t like SEO myopia either - not only do Google and other giants keep optimising their machines to serve human needs better, but they, at the end of the day, do not prioritise content that is better optimised but the content that is more useful to human.
What if you don’t know much about SEO? Outsource someone to help you. But you can do some things as well:
PRO TIP:
Instead of chasing just place 1, focus on improving your click-through rate by optimising headline and meta description.
6. Not aligning goals with your metrics.
To know how to measure your success, you need to define your goals and decide on your KPIs (key performance indicators). Read here how to make SMART goals.
You can set up different goals, whether it's more followers (please read why reach is not the most critical metric.) to increase the number of leads or email subscribers.
Solution:
Whatever those goals are, in measurement, you need to identify the biggest KPI and align metrics to that.
When it comes to the website, I recommend reviewing:
7. Not having an email marketing.
Since you’re reading a newsletter, part of email marketing strategy, I don’t want to spend words explaining it. The email list and your website are the key owned media, and unlike any other channel, you can use them fully to cultivate relationships with your audience and nurture them properly.
Solution:
8. Producing crappy content.
You need someone to write blog and social media posts, so you delegated this task to your office admin. Or even worse, you instructed someone else to use Chat GPT', it’s easy.
p.s. Yes, you can use CHAT GPT, but not to fully write articles. Read how to use Chat GPT as a personal assistant (not a writer!).
Don’t get me wrong, writing is not rocket science, and everyone with an average IQ can learn it. But writing without any prior knowledge is nothing more than wasting resources.
Solution:
If you need good, high-quality content, you can:
If you have all these things above done right, it’s not so complicated.
Once the system is set up, driving that well-oiled content marketing machine will be much easier.
9. Expecting instant results.
The instant gratification concept doesn’t work with content marketing.
Even if you use targeted FB ads, you need time to populate your audience and get your FB pixel to work. Inbound marketing takes time - it’s a pull, not push, approach.
Unlike paid advertising, you can work on your content marketing with a time investment or a modest budget for essential tools.
But content marketing is not a “quick rich scheme”; it’s m’s more of a “reap what you sow” type of work. So, it’s slow, but it has a compounding effect.
Take a year of consistently creating the right content for right people at the right time. Promote the hell out of it. Relax and enjoy. Day or two. Until the next blog post :)
TL’DR
If you get annoyed with this too-long newsletter, just run through this list. If you’re not a subscriber, it’s the right time to subscribe and stay in the loop.
I’ll be writing about each issue separately because that’s how you fix things: see the problem, find the solution, apply it, compare results, iterate.
“Content marketing is all the marketing that’s left”
– Seth Godin.