These are the 5 most common mistakes in your content strategy

Isn’t your content moving any needle, not seeing any real impact, and time and time again? 

And every time you, as a marketing manager, have the dreading content budget-cutting discussions in the leadership team?

Add the overwhelming speed and ease of AI content production to the mix. 

Welcome to 2024!

If you want your content team to be faster and more agile and bring AI from experimental to essential in your organization, you need to revise, dust, and update your content strategy. Learn from the 5 common mistakes, and prevent your content from getting lost in the huge pile of content clutter. 

First, we dive into the 5 most common mistakes, followed by your to-do list on how you can revamp your content strategy and embrace AI. 

Common mistakes in content strategy

This is a list of the most common mistakes in content strategy. You think you have a decent content strategy in place, but actually, you don’t.

1. A strategy is a plan; you have a planning
2. Bring focus with your content strategy
3. Use AI to scale your content (the right way)
4. Quality over quantity
5. Maximize existing content

Embrace AI in your content strategy

We are entering a new AI-powered era, so maybe it’s time to revise your content marketing strategy. Dust and update, also to bring in AI from experimental to essential for your team.

The benefits of a revamped content strategy, with your previous mistakes fixed:

1. Your content team will be faster and more agile to respond to real-time content needs. 
2. Your content will be better, can be scaled (with AI), and can finally contribute to the business objectives.

Let’s dive into these mistakes and how to fix them.

1. A strategy is a plan; you have a planning

A strategy is a plan for how you get from your current status (now) to the desired status (goal). You describe how you allocate your scarce resources and budgets to reach your goal. A well-written strategy brings razor-sharp focus by making decisions on what to do and, above all, what not to do.

• Your goal is not your strategy; ‘Become the thought market leader in our industry’ is a goal; that’s not how you’ll get there. You’ll be surprised how often a goal is mistaken for a strategy.
• Your content planning is also not your strategy: ‘In Q1, we focus on x, in Q2, we run a campaign on y, and in Q3, we do brand storytelling on z’. Your planning is an outcome, a deliverable of your strategy; it’s not the strategy. This totally lacks an overview of how you allocate your resources to get to your goal. A disaster in the making and this content planning will be the first on the chopping block when budget cuts arise.

There is no blueprint for a content strategy; it’s bespoke, just like your brand. But there are some really great reads to awaken and refresh your mind so you can detect the b*llsh*t strategies. ‘Good Strategy, Bad Strategy’ by Richard Rumelt and ‘No Bullsh*t Strategy’ by Alex M H Smit. 

Too busy to read? Listen via Audible and give Alex M H Smit a follow on LinkedIn; his content makes you rethink your strategy.

2. Bring focus with your content strategy

I get it; everyone in your leadership team wants ‘content’ for their own silo or department. And you jump back and forth, trying to serve everyone and all at once. A little bit of such and a little bit of so, scattered all over the place with the philosophy ‘better something than nothing at all.’

Wrong. 

This will not move any needle and add to the clutter. It’s better to focus on doing one or two topics really well with great content of high quality, well-researched, well-written content that you can repurpose and use over and over again. Then, set up a blueprint for the process and then scale to the other departments and their content needs.

This is where the content strategy comes in: it brings focus on what to do and what not to do (yet).

3. Use AI to scale your content (the right way)

You want more content, so you turn to AI for scaling. The hype presents itself as hitting the button, and all your content rolls out of the AI machine.

This is partially true; AI is a part of the solution, yet the real differentiator is within you, not the technology.

If you scale your content without a solid strategy, you’ll create more of the same (mediocre) content, which will not bring you anything in leads or help you claim your leadership in the industry.

It will only make it easier for your leadership team to cut the content budgets, as you still have to prove the value of content to the business objectives, even when you invested heavily in AI.

4. Quality over quantity

Thinking ‘more is better.  No. Just plain no. More content doesn’t equal better business results. Better content equals better business results.

If you want to get your message across with the help of content, you need to stand out in the content clutter, really put your customer first, and develop content based on insight and focus on the customers’ problem. Great content is about them, not about you.

5. Maximize existing content

This blows my mind every time, especially in B2B. So many brands don't reuse what they already have. It's almost as if there's an ego in the way, and they want to tick the box and lock in the budget by producing more sexy new content instead of reusing the old.  

Before you even consider producing more content, look back to what you already have. You can use, reuse, republish, and repurpose what you already have.

It’s very easy to develop at least 10 content pieces out of one blog post. Find the snippets and little chunks. The bits and pieces that you can transform into something bigger or new or snackable for social. All with the help of AI. 

And why not dive into the data and find the most read pages on your .com? Dust and update them. And republish those with the 10 new content pieces.

Your to-do list

OK, now what? You want to revamp your content strategy and don't know how to start. 

Step 1. Assess and be honest
This is where you can take the 5 common mistakes and assess them. Be brutally honest with yourself, your team, and the leadership team. 

What isn't working in the current setup, and how can you help the team do better? Not only with a clear strategy,  also take their input seriously, as they work with your strategy on a daily basis. 

Step 2. Get professional guidance
Developing a clear content strategy that's a plan and embraces AI is no rocket science, yet it's also where you need help from professionals. From experience, it's best not to ask your content marketing agency or advertising agency, as, by default, they are in it for the content production business. 

Ask a consultant who has done this before, knows the drill and pitfalls, and can separate the wheat from the chaff while helping you with stakeholder management and buy-in with the team. Not biased at all, someone like me. 

Step 3. Learn how to work with AI 
Ask an agency to teach you AI. Don't bring them in to do the prompting for you; learn it yourself and embrace this exciting new technology to improve, speed up, and become more flexible. 

You also don't need an army of AI prompt engineers; you need to teach your existing team how to work with AI. 

Final thoughts

If you want your content team to be faster and more agile and bring AI from experimental to essential in your organization, I strongly recommend you to revamp your content strategy.

A nice side effect is that if you have a clear content strategy that measurably contributes to the business objectives, your content team and budgets are not the first in line to be cut when the budget cuts arise.

While you’re at it, these are the most common mistakes in a content strategy. Read and learn so you don’t make them (anymore).

1. A strategy is a plan; you have a planning
2. Bring focus with your content strategy
3. Use AI to scale your content (the right way)
4. Quality over quantity
5. Maximize existing content

Need help? 

I get it; it's a lot, and this whole AI can be overwhelming. If you don't know where to start and need some help from someone who has done this before, knows the drill and pitfalls, and can separate the wheat from the chaff while helping you with stakeholder management and buy-in with the team. 

Not biased at all; that's me. Drop me a DM for a free 30-minute call to check your content needs and if I can help or I can recommend someone else. 

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