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Do you feel that your content marketing strategy seems to be falling flat lately? You are stuck in the same grueling routine and what was once a creative process now seems to be a slow and mindless zombie. However, unlike the show The Walking Dead, there is a cure to bring your content marketing strategy back to life. 

If you blog, post on social media, and regularly update your website's SEO, you already have a content marketing strategy. Whether this is intentional or not, to stay alive in the marketing game, you need to set a goal and regularly find innovative ways to make your content shine brighter than the rest. Your content is more than a sales technique as it bridges the gap between your business and the consumer allowing them to get to know you on a deeper level. Building trust and customer relationships is developed by businesses with a strong content marketing strategy that constantly seek innovative ways to advance and highlight their efforts. 

Marketing is a difficult and delicate art form, and some would consider it to be as difficult as training to become a Jedi Knight. Content will always be the crowning jewel for gauging your online marketing success. Is your website's content engaging and instructive or is it self-referential and littered with jargon? These are impotatnt questions for business owners to consider as they focus on how they're structuring content. If you aren't doing this constantly, you're missing out on a wide variety of opportunities. To help lift your content marketing from the swamps of Dagobah, we've included five mistakes that often hinder a businesses' plans for content marketing success.

Your Content Was Written By A Fourth Grader

Well, not really, but you get the point. Quality content is the foundation for building trust with readers, leading to increased engagement and higher conversion rates (not in all cases). Admittedly, if your content isn't performing well, you may find that a failure to adhere to the basic rules of quality writing may be the source of the problem. Not only is content quality important for educating prospective customers, but it's essential for satiating Google's fluid SEO requirements.

Your Older Content Has Become Stale

This is similar to the issue of poorly written content, yet it's often more easy to fix, especially if you focus your efforts on creating evergreen content. Consider this, have you ever put a lot of effort into a post that was engaging and on-point when you first published it, yet after a while, it generated fewer and fewer visits?
When content becomes outdated, it becomes more difficult to attract and engage readers, often reflecting poorly on your company's ability to relate to reader's current challenges.

You Don't Have Quality CTA's To Take Readers To The Next Step

This mistake can be quite disheartening, especially if you have taken ample time to create content. However, you can't assume readers will consume your content and magically transform into loyal and engaged customers. Rather, you should gently encourage them to take the next step in the purchase process, which often requires them to click a CTA (which brings them to a landing page where they can access valuable content offers in exchange for some of their basic contact information).
Readers generally anticipate a request for them to take action after reading compelling content (after all, that's the main idea behind marketing-- you want readers to do something based on the information they just received).
Make sure that you place an eye-catching call-to-action on your blog posts. Without it, you are leaving your readers at a dead end.

Inconsistent Posting

Be consistent. While you don't have to post every day, readers will appreciate consistency. By publishing on a consistent basis, readers will look forward to reading your content. At first, it may be difficult to be consistent with blogging; however, it helps if you plan a few posts ahead of time. Your blog's success depends on your goals and the effort you put into creating fresh, interesting, and consistent content. Don't fall into the habit of skipping posting. A short, thought-provoking post is better than nothing. Just don't publish useless posts that do nothing more than clutter your blog so people can't find your good content.

1. How Much Do I Really Know About Content Marketing?

Content marketing is always updating and developing into something more, so it is important to do the research and keep yourself informed. Content marketing is is the practice of content including articles, web pages, blog posts, social media, videos, images, and infographics as a promotional vehicle for your business. Effective content marketing provides prospective customers with informational, entertaining, and relevant information, rather than using “salesy” jargon.

Should you be concerned with SEO in your content marketing efforts? The answer is a resounding yes. So, now you may be wondering why you need to keep SEO in mind when you're writing your content, and fortunately, the answer is quite simple. For many years, you could build a satisfactory SEO strategy around tricks and basic tactics, optimizing and banking on opportunism; however, that doesn't work anymore. Rather, now you must create engaging content. SEO provides an opportunity to blend science and analytics with creative content. So, how should you approach writing for your readers while still appeasing search engines? Well, you can take a look at our comprehensive approach to SEO in 2015. In the meantime, take a peak at this Brafton infographic to learn why content marketing provides a measurable boost towards improving your businesses' SEO efforts.