In marketing, you need to plan every single detail of your strategy before actually proceeding to the execution of the plan. But there are always those little things that we did not pay attention to and that seem like a bug in a perfect algorithm that we made.

This article, however, will mention a few mistakes that are often made in content marketing and they might just help you discover the smaller mistakes that you have been making along the way.

1. Get to know your audience before publishing content

Many people start publishing content and expect their audience to interact with it as a part of their marketing plan. However, people are different and how people interact with content is different as well. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to just get a glimpse of who your audience is (and is going to be) by looking at the analytics and even conducting a survey if needed. Once you have a general idea about your audience, you might start publishing content. Also, keep track of your audience’s behavior after you publish content — this will let you know where you want to go from there when it comes to content creation.

2. Quality of content over quantity of content

Another major mistake made by people who plan content strategy is that they assume that if there is more content, it is more likely to achieve certain feedback from people and have a certain number of social media shares, comments, etc. However, this is not really the case and even people who have no idea about marketing will see the hidden intention to gain popularity by publishing a lot. What really matters is to have this one article which will be written in such a way to attract people and be interesting, useful and thought-provoking.

3. Tell a story through your content

One of the basic things that people forget is that your content must tell a story. Each individual piece of it as well as the whole content must be a story, telling your audience about your brand and what you are offering. Therefore, always try to come up with a simple narrative that can keep your audience occupied and that can help you gain more audience.

4. Uniqueness rather than being rule-obeying

There are numerous rules that are important when it comes to content creation and that have to be followed in order to achieve certain results with it. However, content creators sometimes even forget that the purpose of writing is to say something, share something and convey an idea. Instead, they focus on these rules, keywords, target audience and other technicalities. Therefore, dull, robotic and repetitive content is being made and despite following all the rules your marketing strategy fails. Creativity is the basis!

5. Make content interactive

You cannot really do anything if people do not interact with your content. No matter how good and deep your article is, if you do not just casually mention that you would like it to be shared, the percentage of the people likely to share the content will drop. The interaction part does not end by sharing, you want them to comment, discuss, like, tweet and re-blog your content as well. Therefore, when you are about to publish your content, ask yourself — is it interactive enough?

6. Wrap your content the best for the certain platforms

One of the main mistakes made when planning content distribution is to think that all websites and social media will share your content with the same effect. However, in order to be effective on various social media platforms, you need to come up with content which will be suitable for them. Take Twitter, for example — it will be far less effective if you just share your blog and leave it be. Try coming up with a creative tweet to follow it.

7. Thinking that you should hide your intentions to sell something is wrong

Everybody knows that you create and share content with the final goal of selling a certain product and/or popularizing a certain brand and its presence on the Internet. Therefore, there is no need for you to be indirect and use such content which will indirectly lead to sales. Instead, try making useful and interesting content which your audience will appreciate and after which you can freely ask them to buy the product or share the content if they liked it.

To sum up, we all make mistakes in everything we do, but the activity such as planning a content marketing strategy requires extra effort in order to have as few gaps as possible. These were just some of the most general mistakes made by people in this business and you should be extremely careful in order to avoid the traps set by those mistakes.

Amy Cowen is a content marketing strategist who specializes in maximizing the commercial impact of the content. She manages her own team of content writers at Aussiessay and contributes to different sites and blogs.