It’s very simple to create an effective content marketing campaign, but you need to know your target audience and what they want. Also, you need to know the new trends in marketing and how to avoid common mistakes.

Here are some mistakes to avoid.

1. You are not ready to start

You need to be ready to start. Do you know the answers on What is the purpose of your content? Who are you targeting it to? If you don’t know the answers you might fail before you even start.

2. Not giving value

Good content needs a solid takeaway. A message previously unavailable to your readers. Give them something new through your content like value, help, or a solution, and they’ll be hooked on to your every word.

3. Not having a Call-To-Action

An ending paragraph is strong, but a Call-To-Action (CTA) is stronger. Every piece of content needs to arouse something in the reader like curiosity, happiness, or even fear.

Give your reader an action to perform after they have read your content – it could be liking, sharing, commenting, or accessing your website to know more about your product.

4. Choosing quantity over quality

You need to create high-quality content. Don’t be pressured by the speed and frequency of new posts on the Internet. just produce the best content that you can do.

Don’t forget that the search engines love the fresh and high-quality content

5. Not optimizing your content (SEO)

You need the search engine optimization (SEO) for your content marketing plan. Come up with some strong keywords. Do this right, and your content will go to the top of the search results list.

6. Writing long paragraphs

People don’t like the long paragraphs. Breaking up your content into shorter paragraphs or bullet points boosts the readability of your piece. Each paragraph and point also acts like a place-holder in the readers’ minds, which they can refer to at any time.

7. No internal or external links

Internal links to older content are a good way to ensure audience retention, greater interest in your brand, and better optimization for search engines. External links to related topics also add ranking power to your content since Google’s search spiders read them as ‘third-party votes’ for your piece.

8. Not using visual content

Your post’s featured image is the first thing a viewer will see on social media. Relevant images and infographics make people want to read your blog posts. After all, no one likes to read a continuous stream of text.

Content is getting more visual because people love more the visual content than text

9. Overly promotional content

The online audience wants entertaining and engaging content, and also doesn’t want to be marketed to all the time. Don’t produce overtly promotional content, with words such as ‘buy’, ‘sell’, ‘exchange’ etc. Creative, engaging content with out-of-the-box visuals are today’s gold standard in marketing.

4 Trends of Content Marketing You Need To Know

For a small business, content marketing is the sure way to attract new customers and it’s a low-cost effective solution. Also, brands such as Google, Facebook, and Apple are investing thousands of dollars to get original content. Therefore, original and consistent content is a very effective and profitable solution for all the businesses.

Here are 4 trends of content marketing

Video marketing

The future of content marketing is video. A statistic shows that by 2019 video will encompass about 80 percent of internet traffic generated. In addition, a large number of marketers also agree to the report and they believe that video will be the dominant content marketing strategies in the future.

Live streaming

Also, another emerging trend, which is becoming the standard, is live streaming. For your business to stay ahead of your competitors, you must find innovative ways of using this video platform to get new customers.

Content personalization

There are indications that many brands invest in content personalization. The effectiveness of content personalization strategy is very high for any brand that adopts it.

Of course, content personalization is not an easy task, it is challenging. It requires a long-term effort.

User-generated content

Most brands are investing in specifically user-generated campaigns, which inspires loyal customers to become brand advocates and share their positive experience with friends and family on social media.

Actually, people have confidence in content made by others than they trust the brands’ own content.