Mistakes are a big part of business, and learning from them is how we grow. Like any industry, content marketing is full of mistakes but luckily you don’t have to make them all yourself in order to get the best from your marketing budget.

We’ve spoken to some of Australia’s most knowledgeable people in the content marketing industry and asked them one simple question:

What is the most common mistake you see in content marketing campaigns?

In the quotes below, you’ll find that there are four main areas where people are going wrong with content marketing:

• Not understanding their audience
• Not using their content wisely
• Expecting short-term results
• Not measuring their work effectively

The most common mistakes are not having a good understanding of the buyer persona for your business and not knowing which part of the customer journey your content is speaking to. You need to orientate your content around those.

You don’t want views or likes for the sake of it. You want to reach the people that will care about your business and hopefully, one day, will be a customer. Despite what most marketers will tell you, not all engagement is created equal.

I think it’s a lack of understanding of the people they are trying to motivate. Even though a content marketing campaign needs to be valuable and useful, it should ultimately motivate people to take some kind of action. In order to do that, you have to know what’s driving your readers crazy and what kind of transformation they are looking for (as a purchase is really just a tool for transformation).

The most common mistake is not doing extensive, in-depth research before launching a content creation program. We have a lot of clients coming to us with the same problem; they are creating content, but not getting results. This is usually due to them creating the wrong type of content, aimed at the wrong audience, and not including the keywords that will drive them up the search results.

Research on your audience and potential client/customer base needs to be conducted prior to creating any content – creating personas is a great way of clarifying your customer. Figuring out the keywords that best relate to your service and the keywords people are actually searching for is another step that will help lay the foundations for quality content that ranks well.

The biggest mistake I see is that expectations are not aligned – either the marketing team is not aligned with management or the external agency doesn’t manage the client’s expectations with regards to results and ROI. This leads to work being cancelled far too soon as the expectation was that results would be generated sooner or it would be more obvious to see ROI.

Content marketing is a long-term investment – think of it like your super. You won’t be rich from investing in your super after a few months, nor will you from content marketing, but we all know the long term benefit of compound growth. Content marketing is very similar.

Many brands adopt content marketing using a traditional advertising approach – short term campaign planning. The result leads to many marketers and brands writing off content marketing before they’ve truly started with it.

On LinkedIn, brands who adopt an ‘always on’ model and have a documented strategy are those who see the most success. This is down to three key things: they’re visible and adding value at any given time a prospect is looking, they are constantly building trust and authority which in a post-trust world is crucial and they are audience centric, they have stopped talking about themselves.

I think too many marketers have ‘performance anxiety’. That is, few of them apply quantitative goals to measure the success or otherwise of their digital campaigns. Hardly any set conversion metrics, let alone monitor and map performance back to their original proposition.

It seems quantity outweighs quality too often where deadlines are prioritised over measurable content objectives.

Such a lost opportunity to listen, learn and leverage data. And made so accessible via the various analytic programs.

Another key area is to ensure you know how to measure ROI and what it looks like. You might be able to manage expectations and ensure everyone commits to the long-term play, but you still want to see results and improvements.

Making sure you are tracking and reporting on data in the right way is key to knowing if what you are doing is starting to gain traction. If you are and you can measure ROI correctly it only gives you further confidence to keep doing what you were doing.