How to Avoid 4 Content Planning Nightmares
Skip the crises with these quick content marketing tips.
Have you ever experienced a content crisis? Most content marketers have — and they’ve felt the dire consequences on their content performance and marketing goals, too. Well, we say prevention is the best cure — so we thought you might like these quick tips for avoiding four content planning nightmares.
1. Running blind. Developing content with no plan or strategy leaves you shooting in the dark and can be a huge waste of time and resources.
Avoid it: Build a strategic content calendar to help ensure you have a plan — and that it’s aligned with corporate goals, supports internal product lines and covers essential topic areas that fit your customers’ needs.
2. Starting too late. Slapping together a plan at the last minute is better than nothing — but just barely, since you’re likely to end up with gaping holes in your content development, haphazard coverage of topics and stakeholders unhappy that you’ve ignored their input and objectives.
Avoid it: Well ahead of your first content marketing drop, schedule time to talk with key stakeholders, dig into research and other data, and develop a detailed strategy.
3. Focusing on the sell. There’s a time and place to focus on straight sales and promotion of your products and services. But if the sales pitch takes precedence over adding value for your customers, you stand to lose engagement, trust and dollars.
Avoid it: Make sure that a large portion of your content marketing — as much as 60% to 70% — focuses on content that informs and educates your customers. Even sales-oriented pieces should focus on benefits to your audience.
4. Treating everyone the same. Chances are, a 20-year-old Gen Zer has different interests than a 60-year-old who is soon to retire. Ditto for all the segments in between. No wonder delivering the same information in the same way to all of your customers can quickly lead to alienation.
Avoid it: Segment your customer base into specific audience groups based on things like age, life stage, accounts held and more. Then target at least a portion of your content so it appeals to each individual segment.
Want more tips to help your content planning run smoothly? Check out our blog on how to create an editorial calendar.
You can also request a free content calendar, complete with suggested Ready2Go articles for every month. Or, simply browse our online catalog to create your own content plan, fill in last-minute holes and more!
