6 Mistakes You’re Making With Your Content Marketing (and What To Do About Them)
Even strong work falls flat without a plan behind it. These common missteps are quietly costing you results — here’s how to fix each one.
By Kyle Crafton
As with most things in life, learning from your mistakes is a great way to improve. That holds true for content marketing, too. A certain amount of trial and error is expected, but relying on ad hoc content with no real strategy is, well, no strategy at all. And as AI reshapes how people discover and consume content, the cost of not having a plan has only gone up.
Here are six common mistakes you may be making — and how to fix them.
1. You Don’t Have a Messaging Guide
Without a messaging guide that clearly details your audiences, goals, voice, tone and personality, representing your organization consistently is hard. Worse, it’s nearly impossible for multiple contributors to create materials without ending up with contradictory, disjointed messaging. That consistency matters more than ever, because clear, coherent content is what helps AI tools understand and represent your organization accurately.
2. You Don’t Have a Content Strategy
It’s easy to start making content before deciding why. But producing posts, pages and campaigns without a documented strategy means you’re working on instinct — guessing at topics, speaking to no one in particular and hoping everything lands. A content strategy is the plan that ties everything you create to a goal: what you’re trying to achieve, who you’re trying to reach and what role each piece of content plays in getting there.
3. You Don’t Have a Content Calendar
Many organizations know they should be creating content. But when it comes time to write a blog post or post a social update, writer’s block sets in. You either end up sharing low-quality content or you don’t publish anything at all. Ad hoc content creation also leads to incongruous messaging — a disconnected string of posts does not a brand story make.
4. It’s All About You
Yes, at the end of the day, your content should be inextricably tied to your brand identity. But no one likes an egoist, and organizations that do nothing but talk about themselves rarely offer their audiences anything worthwhile.
5. You Treat Distribution As an Afterthought
Publishing content and hoping people find it organically is only a small part of the job. Posting the same thing across every channel without regard to each platform’s audience or format — spraying it everywhere and praying it works — isn’t much better. Without a deliberate plan to get it in front of people, even great content is often dead in the water.
6. You’re Not Tracking Anything
Monitoring and reporting on your content performance is the only way to learn what’s working and what isn’t. If you’re not looking at the analytics, you could be wasting a lot of time and money on content that isn’t earning its keep.
Put a Real Strategy Behind Your Content
From messaging to distribution, C/A can help you develop a comprehensive content marketing plan that delivers results.
Kyle’s career experience spans the media landscape, beginning as a magazine publisher and later as CFO and publisher of MediaBistro.com. He served as the publisher and GM of the Curbed Network, now part of Vox media. In 2010, he swapped New York City for Arizona and dove into agency life, leading digital initiatives — design and development, interactive marketing, UX and search — and working with clients such as Nationwide Insurance, Charles Schwab and NASCAR.
Kyle has taught courses on digital media entrepreneurship and the business and future of journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. He feels at home among the many Chicago ex-pats in Phoenix. His passions include cooking, college basketball and spending time with his (significantly more talented) creative director wife, his teen children and his dog.