Is Your Content Strategy Ruining Sales?

Is something sneaky in your content strategy causing reduced sales?

I get in the car and rush to my next appointment. Freeway traffic brings everything to a halt, and I sit and wait. My stomach starts growling so I eat the fake-chocolate protein bar I have in my briefcase. Finally, traffic lets up, and I get to the conference room just in time for my meeting. I network, provide content strategy tips, answer questions, and then call it a day.

As I get in my car and finally take a breath, I glance in the rear-view mirror. Ugh! I have brown marks from the “fake chocolate” all over my mouth. Great. That looks really professional. I’m surprised no one bothered to tell me. Well, it may have been an embarrassing situation, but it gave me the idea for this blog…

While you may think everything is fine and are ready to give a good presentation, it’s possible that you are missing something important. The same thing can happen with your content strategy. While you believe your messaging is ready to go, there may be something important you completely forgot to check.

With this in mind…

How do You Avoid Content-Strategy Errors?

Marketing moves fast. While you’ve spent time to create a content strategy with an editorial calendar, good sales copy, the right search-engine-optimization (SEO) keyword phrases and more, you may be missing some important errors that can ruin the results of your efforts.

Before your content goes live, here are a few things to add to your overall, strategy for the best results:

1. Review overall, marketing messages.

Do you know what is going on with your entire organization? All of your marketing messages should be uniform across departments, social media, events, and other mediums. Check with all of the right team-members for cohesiveness and timeliness before posting anything.

2. Got errors?

Proofread all content before it goes live. This may seem simple, but it’s important. Check for misspellings, grammatical errors, correct quotes, and more. After all, you want to make a good, first impression at all times.

3. What’s going on in the world?

Did a major, world event just occur that everyone is talking about?
What’s going on right now in your industry or location?

Check the news before you publish content. If you post something about a natural disaster, death, legal process, or other, sensitive issue at the wrong time, your copy could become a PR nightmare.

Don’t Have Fake Chocolate on Your Content!

While having a little, food smudge on your face can be embarrassing, it usually only affects one person and is not a big deal. But if you publish the wrong messaging at the wrong time, you could lose thousands of dollars in sales and waste time and effort dealing with customer complaints and negative press.

Because of this, I suggest you check the mirror before walking into a meeting… AND review the messaging, timing and copy in your content strategy before publishing anything. This way, you’ll feel confident about your appearance, and you’ll be more likely to see successful results from your sales copy!

What are you going to do today to improve your sales with content strategy?

By Melanie Rembrandt, a BtoB content strategist and publicist who helps business owners boost sales, awareness and credibility fast!

If you need help creating a content strategy with SEO copywriting that brings results, please visit www.rembrandtwrites.com.