Modern enterprises rely heavily on their sales teams and outbound marketing methods to find new customers. Although this has worked for many companies, the cost of acquisition for customers can be very high and reduce the overall ROI of marketing efforts. Having a refined content strategy is an alternative way to bring organic leads and customers to enterprises. This allows sales teams to focus on selling and it reduces the overall marketing spend that’s commonly used on lead generation, paid advertising and other marketing campaigns.
Content marketing has been one of the highest ROI forms of marketing for modern enterprises. In fact content marketing provides 3x more leads while costing 62% less than traditional marketing strategies. Most companies are well aware and have experienced the benefits of content marketing, but they are still falling short in their content marketing strategy.
Companies that don’t have significant experience with content marketing can fall into common pitfalls that can lead to little traffic and few conversions. Some of the top pitfalls include:
1. No content strategy
Many enterprises just publish content like news without a clear content strategy. Although it’s good to have some content on your site, there has to be a purpose for every piece published. Without a content strategy, a company publishes random content and wastes their marketing dollars. This leads to little no organic views from search engines and your customers will be unable to find you.
Having a content strategy will enable you to find the keywords that your customers are searching for and generate thousands of free visitors to your site every month. It’s important to sit down with your content team and map out which content is going to be published and why before the beginning of each quarter.
2. Poor keyword research
Keyword research is the backbone of having an effective content marketing strategy. Without keyword research, a company has no information on what keywords are being searched for, how difficult a keyword is to rank for and similar data. Enterprises often invest thousands of dollars into content without doing any keyword research and this leads to no return.
Doing proper keyword research results in ranking for content and getting more impressions and clicks from Google. The majority of companies use tools like Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Moz, etc. to get this done. These tools will give you the most accurate estimate of how much traffic a given keyword is getting and how difficult it will be for your site to rank for those keywords.
Also Read: Ahrefs vs. SEMrush
3. Ignoring competitors
Competitors are often a great way to find out which keywords to rank for. SEO tools allow you to do competitor research to estimate how much traffic a competitor is getting along with the keywords they rank for. This can help inform your keyword strategy and pivot quicker to get more views.
Ignoring competitors can lead to a large gap between you and your competitor. SEO often compounds and the content and links gap between you and your competitor may become too big to overcome if you ignore your competitors for too long. Most SEO tools have the ability to do in-depth competitor research and you can see which content is bringing in the most traffic for them.
4. Tracking wrong KPIs
Many enterprises track wrong KPIs that have little to do with revenue. This is commonly used to justify wrong content strategies to teams and key stakeholders. What companies need to do is to focus on the few KPIs that directly impact revenue from content marketing. This includes metrics like organic views, conversion rates, bounce rate and more. Tracking the wrong KPIs can lead to a negative ROI on SEO efforts in addition to wasted time and capital.
5. Inconsistent publishing
Consistent publishing is important to get organic traffic from Google and increase the amount of keywords you rank for. When a company starts to write content on their site, it may take several months until Google starts ranking the content and bringing organic visitors to the site.
It’s important to keep publishing content because this will allow SEO to compound and bring in more views. Without consistent publishing, companies may never gain the momentum needed to start getting significant traffic
6. Not building links
Links are crucial to building domain authority and increasing organic traffic. When a site starts publishing content, it starts with a domain rating of 0. This means that Google has not given this site any domain authority on any topics. When you get links from other sites, this acts as a vote of confidence that your site is legitimate and your content is valuable for searchers.
Many enterprises do little to no link building even though they have the network to do link building at scale. Some strategies that enterprises can use to build links include guest posting, using infographics and leveraging social media. This will help improve your domain authority dramatically and it will attract more sites to link to yours since your content is ranking better.
7. Lack of conversions
Many enterprises have little to no conversion strategy. There’s no point of bringing thousands of visitors to your site each month without turning them into a customer. Taking simple actions like adding a call to action (CTA) at the end of each blog post can help capture some of your visitors and turn them into customers. Conversions is where most of the money is left on the table during content marketing. If an enterprise cannot improve conversions on their own, a possible option is to hire a B2B SEO agency. They are well equipped with helping enterprises improve their conversions and net more revenue.
Taking a few steps to set up and optimize your conversions can result in many new customers for your enterprise. Some practical steps you can take to improve your conversions include optimizing your headlines, making content more readable and creating a compelling call to action.
Ali Ali is a freelance writer and blogger at alisquared.co. He enjoys writing about marketing, freelancing and building an online business.
