Content marketing for customer acquisition can be a powerful tool when used correctly. Unfortunately, too many businesses jump into content outreach without a clear understanding of potential pitfalls that may negate their digital marketing effectiveness. Wanting to attract potential customers via inbound marketing is an admirable endeavor, but you must be strategic in your approach and avoid costly errors. If you want to increase your content marketing return on investment this year, following are five crucial content outreach mistakes you should avoid.

1) Generic content marketing posts won’t do your business any favors. If you are creating content that doesn’t answer the questions of your target customers or drive leads to your company, your content marketing will have been in vain. Focus on creating quality content that serves a real need, and you will significantly increase your digital marketing ROI.

2) Proofreading is an essential skill too many content marketers overlook. It is not enough to scan your copy for spelling mistakes. You must proofread your text for clarity, message targeting, and delivery of expectation. Your content should deliver what is offered by its title and should provide helpful information your readers can use.

3) Using stock photography is another faux pas impacting your content’s value. If you can’t take the time to create a custom graphic with a tool like Crello or Canva, why should readers put any effort into consuming your content? When you create a custom image for your content marketing and add a text overlay to your graphic, you give your brand another opportunity for search engine optimization via image search.

4) Content marketers who don’t integrate their analytics data into their content creation strategy are lessening the potential of their content outreach efforts. Digging into your website analytics can help you understand which topics resonate with your target audience and which ones need further exploration. The potential of data analytics to turbocharge your content marketing is significant, but you must be willing to put in the time to carefully study your company’s website analytics.

5) Frequency of posting is another crucial content marketing error some brand builders overlook. If you are only going to post on your company blog once a month, your chances of increasing your customer acquisition ROI are slim. Your target audience needs to become accustomed to frequent blog posts from your business if you want content marketing to work for your company. If you aren’t willing to make a concerted effort to build your business via blogging, why even bother to start?

Avoiding these content marketing mistakes is essential for companies hoping to increase sales and fill their sales funnel. Failure to pay attention to these stumbling blocks to customer acquisition could mean your brand-building efforts via content outreach have all been for naught. Have you been committing any of these marketing mistakes without knowing it?